Patrick and I were in Chicago late last week for a presentation from Google. The Google rep was good but did not have a lot of deep insight into any of the specific areas of interest to higher ed. We did find out that Google donates advertisements to nonprofit groups, including colleges and universities.

You might think that after a pitch from Google I might be even more enthusiastic about the adoption of Google services at IWU. I’m actually even more skeptical now than I was before. Google isn’t able to engage in a long-term agreement, so there is no guarantee that free e-mail hosting and apps will continue to be free after 3 or 4 years. It wouldn’t be much fun to engage in a big migration to Google only to have to do it again in a few years.

This has started a healthy discussion about the positive and negative effects of this service. Why do we even provide e-mail hosting at all? Why not just create forwarding aliases to students’ existing e-mail?

The Google rep also explained that the eternal “beta” nature of their software is basically a software design philosophy. The current version is always the public version and updates, changes, and improvements are continually being worked on. This is a sound, positive, user-centered philosophy. I actually like this aspect of Google apps quite a bit. However I am a “power user” who is interested in adapting and learning. Many users are not so adventurous. I don’t think many of our users want to hunt around for features that may or may not have changed since yesterday. It actually sounds like our front-line staff would have a crazy moving target to support.

On the upside, Google is offering 7GB of mail storage per person as opposed to our 250MB. They have tons of data centers which means uptime and performance will probably be better than we can provide. On the downside, we are small fish in the big Google pond, with no financial stake in the deal. What leverage could we possibly have if the system goes away or doesn’t perform as promised?  A small university complaining about a free service to a huge company? I’m not sure the move to Google is right for us. I hope the discussion will continue among the campus community before any decisions are made.