9 ms·

Moved to Fastmail years ago, because my spider sensors were telling me for years that I need to fear companies where I can’t reach a human to resolve conflicts

Moved to Fastmail years ago, because my spider sensors were telling me for years that I need to fear companies where I can’t reach a human to resolve conflicts / problems. - They have an excellent Email service, calendar and contacts management. Most important: At fastmail I get a very quick response from a human who will always help me very quickly. Also I use my own domain name so that I can move my Emails to a new service provider whenever I want. And while I was at it, I replaced Chrome with Firefox on my Mac and never looked back. Finally I moved all my photos to iCloud, replaced my Android phone with an iPhone, got a paid account at Dropbox, started doing backups like there won‘t be cloud services tomorrow (Carbon Copy Cloner ftw!) I have a google account, only for using Youtube (paid). And I like their search results. Even that is too much google for my taste. Edit: Ahh, Gsuite. I migrated to office365 (microsoft). But I use it mostly offline (Word, Excel). Actually for legacy stuff. Because I started writing my documents with Emacs + Org and export to whatever format my recipient needs, doc, html, markdown (using pandoc extensively).

realusername 6y ago
I've also moved to Fastmail years ago for the exact same reason, I've setup Gmail autoforwarding to my new email address. Ironically I'm now permanently locked out of my old Gmail address despite knowing the password, sounds like I've made the right choice.
- doctor_eval 6y ago
  That's not irony, that's vindication :)
doctor_eval 6y ago
I had a bit of an argument with a good guy who just couldn't understand why I wasn't willing to put all our new company's documents on Google. I convinced him (grudgingly) to use a setup much like this (we ended up with Box instead of Dropbox because I got sick of Dropbox trying to grab all my data). Seeing things from his perspective, I was amazed at how successful Google has been in convincing other businesses to take on Gmail, Google Docs, etc. When I think about the enterprise focus of Google, as well as the continuous rebranding, product EOLs, and crappy user interfaces, it's hard for me not to see Google as the new Microsoft. As a former Linux desktop user who lived through the whole MS antitrust thing, I find it absolutely bizarre that today, I'm much happier with Office 365 on the web, than I was with Google Docs. I still worry about all my photos being in iCloud, but it seems like less of a risk since I'm a customer of Apple, rather than a product of Google.
- donny2018 6y ago
  And if you are even on Office 365 Home account, you actually can interact with human support in case of issues.
  - hilbert42 6y ago
    Why should you ever need to? MS Office should be so terribly mature by now that you should never need to. By now, it ought to be faultless. Surely, you don't still have problems with it. Do you?
    - donny2018 6y ago
      It was a minor issue with Outlook.com web mail a few years ago. I contacted support, they asked to see the problem through remote access. My problem was escalated and fixed. Maybe their spam filter is not as good as Gmail, but customer support is another league.
    - doctor_eval 6y ago
      Sure would come in handy if you got locked out of your account though...
- hilbert42 6y ago
  "As a former Linux desktop user who lived through the whole MS antitrust thing, I find it absolutely bizarre that today, I'm much happier with Office 365 on the web, than I was with Google Docs." Identially the same with me. Damn terrible turn up for the books, isn't it. It just illustrates how messy things have gotten and how we need to bring major change to the internet. That said, for me Office 365 is a step too far. On Windows I still ocassionally use the 2003 version along with LibreOffice and the latter on all my Linux machines.

realusername 6y ago

I've also moved to Fastmail years ago for the exact same reason, I've setup Gmail autoforwarding to my new email address. Ironically I'm now permanently locked out of my old Gmail address despite knowing the password, sounds like I've made the right choice.

doctor_eval 6y ago
That's not irony, that's vindication :)

doctor_eval 6y ago

I had a bit of an argument with a good guy who just couldn't understand why I wasn't willing to put all our new company's documents on Google. I convinced him (grudgingly) to use a setup much like this (we ended up with Box instead of Dropbox because I got sick of Dropbox trying to grab all my data). Seeing things from his perspective, I was amazed at how successful Google has been in convincing other businesses to take on Gmail, Google Docs, etc. When I think about the enterprise focus of Google, as well as the continuous rebranding, product EOLs, and crappy user interfaces, it's hard for me not to see Google as the new Microsoft. As a former Linux desktop user who lived through the whole MS antitrust thing, I find it absolutely bizarre that today, I'm much happier with Office 365 on the web, than I was with Google Docs. I still worry about all my photos being in iCloud, but it seems like less of a risk since I'm a customer of Apple, rather than a product of Google.

donny2018 6y ago
And if you are even on Office 365 Home account, you actually can interact with human support in case of issues.
- hilbert42 6y ago
  Why should you ever need to? MS Office should be so terribly mature by now that you should never need to. By now, it ought to be faultless. Surely, you don't still have problems with it. Do you?
  - donny2018 6y ago
    It was a minor issue with Outlook.com web mail a few years ago. I contacted support, they asked to see the problem through remote access. My problem was escalated and fixed. Maybe their spam filter is not as good as Gmail, but customer support is another league.
  - doctor_eval 6y ago
    Sure would come in handy if you got locked out of your account though...
hilbert42 6y ago
"As a former Linux desktop user who lived through the whole MS antitrust thing, I find it absolutely bizarre that today, I'm much happier with Office 365 on the web, than I was with Google Docs." Identially the same with me. Damn terrible turn up for the books, isn't it. It just illustrates how messy things have gotten and how we need to bring major change to the internet. That said, for me Office 365 is a step too far. On Windows I still ocassionally use the 2003 version along with LibreOffice and the latter on all my Linux machines.