Business Insight Zone

Yesterday while I was out and about I used my laptop to compose a blog post. Since there was no WiFi access where I was at the time, I just saved the post as a Notepad document.

Now that I’m back in the saddle at work, I want to plug in that post here . . . but the only copy of it lives on my laptop, which is sleeping on my desk at home.

Document sharing service Zoho made news in the past few days by launching a feature that allows you to work on Zoho docs offline, then sync them online whenever you like. But as I do with many tidbits of tech-geek niftiness, I just made the tiniest mental note of it, thought that the procedure might be slightly more complicated than I’d like, and moved on to other things. Now I’m wishing that I’d fired up my Zoho account and set the thing up, because then maybe I wouldn’t be in the (very mild) Predicament of the Trapped Blog Post.*

What I’d like is to have access today to the future system — I take it for granted that it will someday exist — that will automatically, without friction or even thought on my part, park my files where best it can park them, i.e. on my hard drive if there’s no Internet connection, on Zoho’s (or Google’s, etc.) servers if there is an Internet connection. I want this to work like my cell phone works when I fly from Austin to Denver: I turn it off when the flight attendants tell me to, and then when I turn it on again in Colorado, it knows automatically that it should now display Mountain Time.

The best technology is the stuff that keeps you from having to think about it. That’s what I want from the ideal electronic filing system.

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* For some reason, that sounds to me like the title of a Sherlock Holmes short story: “The Predicament of the Trapped Blog Post.”

“What do you suspect, Holmes?”

“We need not suspect, Watson, that which we may know for a certainty. And we may take it as certain that the victim did not have use of Zoho document sharing — else why would he not have liberated the blog post?”

“Remarkable, Holmes. Perfectly sensible when you say it, but it would have taken me an hour to puzzle it out.”

“Nonsense, Watson. You underestimate yourself. . . .”

Category: Internet, The working life