Cloud Services Graveyard

I'm compiling a list of the cloud services that I have used, which have disappeared on me, leaving me hanging in various states of out-in-the-cold.

• Yoggie - the most painful.  Its demise left me with two paperweight firewall devices that ceased to work properly.  
• me.com - rolled into iCloud
• Google Reader - quite sad to see this one go.  It was a great news aggregator and very simple.  Haven't found anything yet that takes care of the same task with as much ease.
• Live Mesh - this got rolled into Microsoft's Live/SkyDrive mess, but never had the same level of functionality or cross-platform support as before.  I was a heavy user and I miss this one.
• Google Buzz - fortunately, only tried this one a couple times, and then hardly noticed when it went away.  Maybe I was part of the problem?
• MSN Messenger - rolled into Skype as far as I can tell.  More amalgamation of Microsoft's various listless and directionless pet projects.
• Latitude - this one was nice and simple and easy - a really elegant and well done google app.  Kept our family in touch nicely.  It has more or less vanished into the big vague Google+ soup and I'm not sure if I can manage to get that mess to give me what I want from this any more.    Google+ changes, grows, shrinks, and morphs so much I never know from one visit to the next what options I'll have, or even where they've been moved to.

Response to Blackberry's Recent Open Letter

Dear Blackberry,

I recently received your "Open Letter to Customers".  It saddened me.

I don’t know what you are trying to achieve with emails like this.  I never get stuff like this from Apple or Google or Microsoft – I wonder why?  Even by actually sending the email, without any regard to the content, you are already sending a negative “DAMAGE CONTROL” message.  Personally I believe it just makes the situation worse. 

As to the actual content:  I’ll be honest – I’m not going to read the whole letter.  I don’t have the time, and frankly I’m not that interested.  I have skimmed your section headings and the general impression I get is “uh huh.  More of the same.”  You could sign this email John Chen, Thorsten Heins, or Balsilie/Lazaridis and pretty much accurately represent the same tired old message of decline that they sent out before you. 

If Blackberry is still in as serious denial about the situation as this email seems to indicate, then I’m more than happy to continue outfitting my users with iPhones and Androids, and unless your BES MDM solution is actually free, I’m not interested in it either, thankyou very much.  I already have MDM built in with my Meraki Cloud WLAN solution. 

As a proud and happy Canadian, I am highly predisposed to root for Blackberry, a once-mighty Canadian Tech giant.  But sadly this email indicates to me that we really are seeing another Denial-Demise-of-Nortel repeated in grim detail.

And it makes me sad.

So long, Blackberry.  At this point emails don’t mean anything.  Produce an actual successful product and then we can talk – and that doesn’t mean turning to patent-trolling either.   For goodness' sake, don't do THAT.

I even lined up for your much vaunted BBM-on-iOS app, and have installed it and tried it.  Sadly, it is not very compelling - quite a mess actually.  The much simpler and more visually appealing interfaces of WhatsApp and iMessage keep me coming back, and leaving BBM to whither, unused, on my device.