Whose world is this anyway? It’s that time again, the dreaded close race of superpowers, with no clear winner in sight. Where is a level-headed conservative person supposed to lay his loyalties, fortunes and favors? This is not politics I speak of, but document file storage — the very same fight that years ago gave rise to the mainframe, then personal computers, then kilo-, mega-, giga-, tera- and the dreaded petabyte.
The creation, use, storage, retrieval and hopefully destruction of the simple written word has become a driver of more than just an economy, it has transformed the very fabric of society. Now any individual with access to a computer, smartphone, etc. can put fingers to keys and begin the creation process, unaware of the magnitude of burden they are placing on the IT industry.
Dropbox, Box, Amazon Web Services, Hightail (formerly known as YouSendIt) and the plethora of systems Microsoft would have us learn, purchase, secure and support are all vying for us to abandon our traditional and well-established use of the folder, finder and directory structure. This known albatross on a company’s resources is ripe for drastic change, but which alternative to choose?