Google, I hope you’re listening
With the recent release of Google Voice (at least in private beta), we really get a sense for how Google likes to integrate services and provide centralized management.
I can’t overstate how much I am in favor of this. However, it seems that Google has overlooked a painfully obvious way in which it can offer a huge value to its users–and how it can “steal” a huge part of Microsoft’s market-share of corporate users.
I’m not even asking for new features so much as I am asking for new ways to access existing Google services: (1) a Microsoft Exchange wrapper for Google accounts and (2) single-logon / account linking.
Now, I like web interfaces, and I realize that as a technological “culture”, we’re headed in that direction. But until web applications catch up to the power of Microsoft Outlook, I want the best of both worlds: I want to be able to access the same email/calendar/contact/tasks store whether through Google’s web access or through Outlook. I don’t want to have another program that has to run on my computer that syncs Outlook with Google. I want Outlook to connect to my Google account using the Microsoft Exchange protocol in the same way that it might connect to the Microsoft Exchange server at my office: all changes are instantaneously pushed to and from Outlook and Google, and anything done in Outlook in “offline” mode gets pushed upon re-establishing a connection to Google. (Think about how much more convenient it is for you to have Google calendar and contacts items pushed to and from your iPhone than it is to have to sync with your computer.)
Now here’s where the integration really comes in: If you’re like me, you may have multiple Google accounts. You probably started out with a Gmail account way back when, and as Google expanded their services, you also got the calendar and tasks list. But then Google came out with Google Apps for businesses/organizations, and now you have at least one of those. And as more businesses adopt Google Apps in lieu of Microsoft Exchange, it’s more and more likely that people will have multiple email addresses, contact lists, calendars, and tasks lists. What I want is to have one Google logon account–just a username and password–with which I can associate all my Google-hosted services. So imagine my Google username is LogicalArthur. I’d log in as that, and I would immediately have access to Arthur@DeltaWerx.com email/contacts/calendar/tasks, my Arthur@ClubLogic.org email/contacts/calendar/tasks, and any other Google / Google Apps accounts I might acquire in the future. When I go to my LogicalArthur email inbox, I see the Arthur@DeltaWerx.com and Arthur@ClubLogic.org email inboxes listed on the left (and how about my Google Voice inboxes as well?). When I go to the LogicalArthur calendar, I see all my calendars listed from all my accounts (in a similar fashion to how you can view multiple calendars already, but with full read/write privileges). Etc. Actually, it would be pretty awesome to be able to configure my account such that it merges the various services. So I could tell it that I only maintain one calendar or one tasks list, and it would automatically merge the services, so Arthur@DeltaWerx.com and Arthur@ClubLogic.org would share the same calendaring or tasks service, even though they’re really two different accounts. (I should be able to do the same with email and/or contacts, if that’s my preference.)
And here’s the icing on the cake: I want the option to sign into this single integrated account with Microsoft Outlook using the Exchange protocol. Each of my Google email accounts associated with my logon (whether straight Gmail or part of a Google Apps account) will be presented as separate inbox folders. It will also present multiple contact lists, multiple calendars, and multiple tasks lists–unless I decide to merge any of the services as I described above.
Google, I hope you’re listening. This would make the electronic management of my life so much easier, and I suspect many other people would similarly enjoy these features. From a technological standpoint, they’re extremely easy to implement–I just don’t personally have the skill-set (yet?) to program it.
Please do it!
