For the most part I stayed away from articles attempting to explain Facebook’s reasoning in acquiring WhatsApp. That is, until Ben Thompson posted his take, where he continued the “company-as-conglomerate” trend in dubbing Facebook the Social Conglomerate. Although I found myself nodding in agreement to the majority of his post, I did take issue with one bit: towards the end, Ben called Apple a personal computing conglomerate; however, I believe a more apt designation would call Apple the quality conglomerate, pursuing excellence in not only hardware, but every aspect of the computing experience. One could certainly argue their effectiveness across the board — iCloud probably being the poster child against using “quality” as the operative word in that sentence — but you get points for trying in this game, not only for succeeding; case and point Facebook and WhatsApp.
I wanted to get into this when I explained why you should manage your own website, but that got a little long and this topic deserves its own post. I have talked before about my setup and myblogengine, First Crack, but today I want to explain how I run my site, so that you can run yours. I agree that most technical people underestimate the difficulty of setting up a website, and so today I will make that easy.
As a born PC user I rarely interact with iCloud on my main computer. Even on my iOS devices I rarely use iCloud, where, given the choice, I will choose Dropbox or some other method to sync documents and settings across devices. The most recent episode of Back to Work, Lotta Little Knives, brought the issue to a head in my mind, and Ben Brooks’s less recent article Archived Data, in the Cloud, in which he proposed an interesting solution to the topic at hand, prompted me to write this piece.