IT Giants. Grow Up!

(Image taken from MacWorld)

I love IT. I love technology. I love gadgets.

The problem is, that generally I only have a vague idea of how to use any of them.

To my wife’s constant annoyance, the house is littered with IT kit that is rarely or poorly used.

We have thousands of TV channels in multiple languages, On Demand, and a very swish Blueray player. All completely unnecessary to watch the BBC News.

I am writing this post on my IPad mini. Later, I might revisit it on my MacBook Air, or possibly on my IMac. Should any of you call me, I will answer on my IPhone 6.

Really.

I need to find a support group.

It turns out that there is one. There are more of us. IT ‘early adopters’ with the technical know-how of a turnip.

We are the main readership of several prominent blogs like LifeHacker, T3 and Imore to name a few of my favourites.

We voraciously consume post after post on how to be more efficient, or on what fantastic new app is going to revolutionise our workflow (whatever a workflow might be).

We read in awe as proper ‘techies’ exchange views on the relative merits of IFTTT versus Pushbullet.

In the tech world, there are three IT Giants that control pretty much everything. Apple, Google and Microsoft.

In a gross over-simplification, Apple make amazing hardware, Google is king of the Internet and Microsoft keeps big business running.

About five years ago, I became an Apple ‘Fanboi’. The IPhone was my gateway hardware, and apart from a brief dalliance with a Dell – I have been an Apple junkie ever since.

Then I discovered that for email – the real deal comes from the mighty Google. I can get all of the amazing functionality of G-mail but in my own imaginatively named domain (stuartlennon.com).

The drawback of Gmail is that really smart people at Google cannot, for the life of them, work out why I would want to keep my email anywhere, other than on their servers.

So, Gmail doesn’t play nice with email clients that look to organise email on your own machine. Clients like Outlook for example.

Microsoft have done OK with software.

There’s a thing called Windows that has kind of done OK and their office suite (including Outlook) is almost universal.

So, right now – my dream team would be G-mail integrated with Outlook on Apple Hardware.

Microsoft have now released a Microsoft Outlook that plays nice with Apple.

Hurrah!

But Microsoft and Google?

No. We are not playing nice with them on computers. On tablets, Yes. On phones, Yes.

But on computers?

No.

Outlook won’t play nice with Gmail on a Mac and I want something that works across all my devices.

I still can’t have it.

The IT company that comes out on top is not going to be the smartest or the most aggressive.

It is going to be the one that listens to consumers.