Sold my soul... to Google

Today I sign LineRate Systems up for Google Apps and I have to admit that so far I like it.

The thing to understand is that I have been a huge fan-boy of do-it-yourself basic services cobbled together with blood-sweat-and-tears from different open source packages. I have also been a big, keep your information in house. This stance has lead to multiple arguments with my co-founder Manish and other folks over the years.

What tipped my hand?

First, I've realized that I am not superman and that I simply do not have the resources to devote to building and maintaining my own IT setup.

Second, and more importantly Google has added various features to their offering that make it compelling:

1) They added CalDAV support to their calendar solution. This is awesome as it lets me continue to use apple's iCal application or whatever calendaring solution I care to use.

2) Group calendaring - not sure when this went public, but I was using when I interned at Google and it makes scheduling so much easier

3) Resource reservation - nice.

4) Postini - ability to archive mail for regulatory compliance. Translation, I don't need to lose sleepy worrying whether the email backups are actually working.

5) Ability to embed Google Doc's presentation directly in web pages.

The only reason I'll continue to maintain a basic webserver? Google Sites is hella lame and primitive.
But I'm sure it'll catch up.

And now that my automated email import is finishing up, I concede that Google is a reasonable place to outsource one's basic IT services.

(heck I may migrate my personal domain as well in the near future)