Alexander Chalkidis

Category: Technology

  • A new Facebook feature: The “I told you so!” button

    Facebook is, essentially, a Content Management System.  (CMS)  Only it is a really, really, extraordinarily bad content management system.   Its search function is rudimentary to say the least.  There is little categorization and even less user generated categorization.  It is almost impossible to find something from the past.

    To large degree this is because Facebook’s engineers are obsessed with making the interface impossible to automate.   Any script you might like to have such as “accept all” (friend requests) or “delete all” (messages)  is reverse engineered so as not to work.   It stops people like me from making so many false accounts and conducting experiments to some degree.   Which means the user has to jump through all sorts of unnatural hoops to get anything done.   “Who cares?   Isn’t Facebook just for wasting time and socializing?”  Well, yes, but even when socializing, some of us like to maintain a higher level of discussion.

    Case in point.  Surprise, surprise, Lance Armstrong was doped.   Where are those discussion I had about this topic a couple of years back?   Who was that friend that insisted I was being extreme?   Whether I am simply a pedantic friend, or someone actually looking for an old joke in my status updates, this is a practically impossible task right now.   I would have to scroll down my wall for a very very long time and then use my browser’s “search” capabilities.   Depending on the kind of search this would be either difficult or impossible.  Multifactorial searches out of the question.   I can’t ask Facebook things like “probably a year ago, a female friend of a friend commented on something I wrote about homeopathy.  What was the name of the substance she recommended?”

    It may seem petty or minor to you.   Some psychological deficiency of mine personally maybe that makes me want to make these things clear all the time.   Or a hypersensitivity to long term trends which I am always searching for.   I studied theory of knowledge at university and tend to make an extra effort to calculate long term odds for anything I see.  Cycling is of course “one of those sports” which is more susceptible to doping.   If you don’t see the point of such functionality, you were probably not around when Zuckerberg announced he wants us all to use Facebook as our digital life store.  Well Mark, do you mind if I organize mine a bit better than you?   It does seem that your main concern is making money and mine would be finding my stuff.

     

  • Here is exactly what Tim Cook needs to do with Apple: turn it into IBM!

    The thing about us consultants is that we give advice even when nobody asked for it.    The world’s biggest company surely doesn’t need my help.   Even more so since I have historically and openly criticized it at every corner.   But, like my friends always say, I probably have a secret wish to one day buy an iPhone.   So here is my best shot at how this might come to pass:

    1. I loved IBM laptops.  In this blog I wrote an almost erotic in intensity elegy.  I still check out the odd Lenovo I see somewhere to see if that keyboard has the old IBM magic, the design details.

    2. Tim Cook is essentially an IBM person at heart.  12 pretty important years in his personal development made him so.   IBMers are a breed apart, the corporate ethos was much more intense than Apple those days.

    3. IBM hardware was always top quality and slightly more expensive.   You could usually pay 20-30% more for a machine with similar specs.   Remind you of someone?

    4. IBM always made conservative decisions about specifications, I/O, software and other components.   Which meant that you have a much better chance to still be relying on the machine even a decade later.  Which justifies the price difference retrospectively many times over.

    …and therein is the difference.   I tried to revive an IBM laptop and a top of the range Apple desktop of about the same era.   Started up the IBM, pressed F2, it came back to Windows XP factory settings.  Left it online to update itself and it is ready almost anything.   The Mac impressed my kids more with its massive monitor and fancy hardware.    “We want to play with the one with the Apple!” they chanted as I struggled to prepare it for use at their school.   To no avail.  Getting OS9 to do anything (especially online) requires almost root level hacking skills.   Meanwhile the ΙΒΜ was playing all their latest Flash game favories, YouTube videos, and I could even load up some ancient DOS games I found lying around back from my gaming days twenty years ago.

    Anecdotes aside, here is the point:   there will always be a need for high quality hardware.  Even more so if it is matched with great design.   Even more so if it has a tidy ecosystem to make it easier to use.   This does not however require stone walls and proprietary tricks.   We don’t want Apple to invent a new connector for our monitors, much less so for our mobile phones.   We are willing to pay Apple to produce 20-30% more expensive hardware because they have put more effort in its design and quality.   In its ease of use.   In good marketing, which means getting the right people using the platform; it benefits everyone on the platform after all when this happens.

    Apple is doing none of this right now.   But Tim Cook has a seriοus personal – leadership problem.   He can’t get people to forget the (inevitable) mistakes he makes like Steve Jobs did.   No glossing over.   He talks simply.   No magic involved.   So why doesn’t he take Apple towards the good old hardworking IBM ways he broke his teeth on?   If he doesn’t, Samsung will.   And I will still prove my friends wrong for another decade by not buying an iPhone for another ten years…

  • The legal limits of Facebook privacy and internal checks or balances

    For those outside of Greece, the case yesterday of someone getting arrested for making a Facebook page probably sounds a bit like some Muslim fanatic in Iran.   It is not quite the same in some ways though it is true that Church and State are way too close in our country.  Interestingy no major news agency has covered the case, so your best bet for a summary of the facts is in this article on HuffPo and this one from Greek reporter.

    Our (anyone who cares about free speech) first reaction was of course to start similar parody Facebook pages ourselves.   Not as many as I hoped but about a dozen pages, equally or more funny than the original were started today.   Worryingly a few of them were removed almost instantly by Facebook.   Even more worryingly in one case the person who made the page had her whole Facebook account removed!

    But then my legal mind fired up.   So I started a page which is an exact replica of the page that got the 27year old arrested.   Based on what I could find from the Google cache.   Arrest me now!   All I did was take publically available information from one part of the internet and put it on another part of the internet.   If they want to put me on trial today alongside the original page creator they will have to close down Google servers first!

    Still, from a strictly Facebook point of view, they could close down the page for whatever breach of whichever rule they pick.   Their social network, their rules.   The case does produce some interesting questions such as “how and why did Facebook give the Greek authorities access to the page creator’s IP adress?” but technically and legally they could close down my clone page.  So I deleted it!   Not before it had 124 likes which means that I can’t delete it though.   Because Facebook makes any page delete request wait for 14 days.

    So for the next 14 days, a page identical to the one that got someone arrested is publicly available here and Facebook can’t do anything to me.   Or at least if they do, they will be way way worse in terms of breach of logic than even the Greek police was yesterday.

    It’s called freedom of speech people.  Get used to it.   There was nothing insulting of Christianity in the Facebook page called “old man Pastitsios”.   Making fun of the people gaining from the memory of a possibly gifted man who has died cannot and should not be illegal.

  • The precursor to Facebook groups 450 years ago worked much better

    A ridotto was pretty much like a Facebook group.   It gathered like minded people around a topic.   It was private, like a club.   Any of you who have visited Florence might have seen the plaque commemorating the Camerata, a ridotto which met at the house of Giovanni Bardi di Vernio.   They argued and talked, and gossiped and had flame wars.   I assume pretty much like people do in forums or Facebook groups.   They repeated themselves, they clashed, some member came and some left.   But in the twenty years that this group met at this house, they did something much more important:

    They made the first ever opera.

    Because – unlike most Facebook groups – the ridotto channeled the energies of its members around a theme.   They were concerned with the nature of musical expression.  Vincenzo Galilei (father to the famous Galileo), based on the conversations in this house, made scathing public attacks on the madrigal, the “pointless pop song” of the time.  But they didn’t just post pictures on their common timeline.   They didn’t stop at making fun of the ridiculous repetitiveness of madrigal technique.   They developed and refined specific theories to explain why the artificiality of the madrigal was useless for human expression.   They didn’t just make a facebook fan page for Girolamo Mei, the scholar who was their guru, they developed his ideas further:   one singer, simple accompaniment, clear wording, natural declamation, no dance rhythms on the words, music to express the emotions of the singer.

    The Florentine Camerata staged “Daphne” by  Rinuccini and Peri in 1598.  Other members of the ridotto and Monteverdi soon followed. The world has had opera ever since, the musical genre which has survived without interruption ever since.   That in itself is quite a success in a world which has been shaken by everything from the Renaissance, to the Industrial Revolution since.

    Now get back to your Facebook tab.   Yes, I know you have it open!   Check out the content, especially in pages or groups organised around a particular topic.   Do you think there is ever a chance they will produce anything close to a new musical genre?  If it happens, it won’t be with any help from the technology.  The members argue about the same topic at regular intervals, yet there is no way to organise the arguments like at http://debatepedia.idebate.org .    People nitpick about the exact meaning of specialized terms yet there is no specialised dictionary being built.   Heck, you can’t even easily find an old discussion!   But most of all, you have no sense of actually building on something.   It is unsatisfying, confusing and ultimately a waste of time.

    This is ridiculous given the technology at hand.   Most Facebook groups are built around a cause.   It would be quite easy to almost automatically make some of the content in a good online spat, end up available online for the public.   To intelligently build around a mission statement.   To make members feel they are actually achieving something.   So, since Facebook is so obviously intent on staying in the “timewasting” part of the market, I ask of everyone else to make the plug in technologies to get the job done.   An app to get content out of Facebook and into a blog maybe.   Another to find unusual terms or specialised words and compile them into a dictionary for new members (or the public).   Just scroll down the timeline of a Facebook group you are a member of and loads of other great ideas will come.

    In fact I think I will setup a ridotto for people that want to work on this idea.

    [soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/50690875″ iframe=”true” /]

  • Oscar Pistorious, Olympic cheating, mobile phone processors and the PC upgrade problem

    When I first read that an athlete was using “blades” I thought they meant servers.  Blade servers are rack mountable computers.   For anyone involved in computing infrastructure part it is part of the everyday lingo.   You try to find the best combination of CPU power, SSD storage if you can and other nerdy things that will end up making a difference when you crunch or serve data.   So maybe this guy was analyzing his technique with the help of multiple servers like I have seen them do in swimming or other competitive sports at the highest levels.

    Turns out he is using prosthetic limbs.   Which possibly give him an unfair advantage.   His lower leg is more than 2kg lighter than his competitors.  Others focus on aspects where he is slower due to these blades.   My question is really quite simple:

    What if the company making Oscar Pistorious’ blades give him a new model which shaves a second of his time?

    Suddenly he would be scoring olympic gold and possibly breaking records.   The same body, with just a small tweak in the prosthetics, would be able to produce much different results.   What if he and others decided to start at the high jump?   Suddenly we would all be discussing the technology in their blades rather than the athletes.   What if he started to run 1500m instead of 400 and he always started really slow but then steamed ahead in the second part of the race as his competitors (without blades) got tired in the lower part of their legs but his blades continued as always?

    Progress in sports results follows a pretty linear path.   (With the exception of certain sports in Mexico due to the altitude.)  As the human body reaches its limits this tails off.   In technology we have Moore’s law but in fact, the perceived benefit to the user of a PC is tailing off.   For more than a decade Intel has been worrying about this, Microsoft has been trying to think of CPU intensive tasks we would really find useful enough to justify constant upgrades.   Mobile phones is where the action is, where you see adverts for “dual core” or “quad core” processors and actually care.   These pocket wonders playback HD video with ease, do voice recognition (with not so much ease) and multitask pretty effectively.   Some of us rely on them to actually get work done, so speed is crucial.   We are willing to pay for it.   When netbooks appeared, people groaned about the puny Atom processors.   Zoom forward, repackage the same thing as a tablet and nobody cares!  It is the job of the user interface to hide the technology.

    It is clearly not a good long term strategy for the Olympics to allow athletes like Pistorious in the Olympic Games.   Unlike mobile devices which cross over boundaries, competitive sport is a show, a spectacle, an idea.   If my next mobile phone opens up documents twice as fast I will be happy.  If it responds as fast as a real secretary to my voice commands I will be ecstatic.   But if Pistorious’ next blades get him halving some Olympic record the whole planet will be annoyed.

     

    Note:  Just a few weeks after I wrote this post, Oscar Pistorius affirmed my conclusions in the worse possible way.   After losing the 200m race in the Paralympics he complained that his opponent “cheated” by using different blades than he did!  If you see the race, the way the Brazilian caught up with him was indeed rather ridiculous;  which simply highlights the problem I was writing about.

     

  • Why I care that you don’t choose Macs

    Much has been written about Apple’s amazing ability in marketing.   About Apple fan boys (and girls).   About Steve.   In terms of popular culture it is interesting and in terms of business it is amazing.   (Though not easy to emulate.)   But my question here is slightly different:   Do I have a right or an obligation even to fight Mac lovers anywhere I find them?

    Let’s not get caught up in any technical questions.   Obviously many people don’t care if it is stupid or not to insist on a mouse with just one button, or whether Safari crumbles instantly in any security competition.   And millions of people are happy, even ecstatic, about their shiny Macs and happilly play with them for years.  (Well, sort of; they are still not much good if you want to play games.)   They pay a hefty price premium for it but that is no problem in terms of the global economy.

    Current figures give the global Mac share at around 7% of annual PC sales worldwide.   It isn’t much and it hasn’t been growing much either.   For someone that has watched this debate for precisely 30 years now it seems almost stagnant.   Which would explain why we don’t do much about it.

    You see technology is not about lonely geeks behind their monitors.   Technology is about platforms.   If I really find Skype great, it will be rendered useless if all my friends or associates don’t also install it.   If I like to be able to swipe my smartphone from the top down to see settings on Android I will be put back if nobody else does and Android 6 doesn’t include such a feature.   And if I like the versatility of Windows I will be devastated if we fall into what I consider the dark ages of Apple straight jacket technology.   It is in my interest, in a very simple almost biological analogy, to persuade as many people as possible to use technology like I use it.    I liked netbooks and it is probably the iPad’s success that killed off that whole project.   If enough people sustain Apple’s premium price, fat margin, business model, I lose out.

    Conversely it is proof that Apple technology is in fact inferior that only 7% of customers choose it.   A technological product, throughout it’s lifetime is not just about looking cool or doing a few things well.   Customers figure it out and avoid Apple.   In Greece for example we have extremely bad Apple tech support simply because not enough people know the OS and have access to Apple peripherals.   They have a gut feeling that the machine will cost much more over time.

    I don’t like iTunes and what it does to my computer’s resources.   I love multitasking and all Apple devices don’t.   I really don’t understand why we should put up with Quicktime anymore.   Flash works fine for a lot of stuff and I am much happier with a mobile device that supports them.   I think machines should have plenty I/O devices and these should be as common as possible.   I don’t like manufacturers that solder things together for no sensible reason other than their warranty policy.   I’m just not built to be an Apple fan boy.

    And if Apple was ever to pass the 20% market share mark a lot of these things that I don’t like would become mainstream.   So I will fight you in Europe where you are weaker, I will fight you in the forums, I will fight you on Facebook, I will return your Tweets with links gallore.   I will never surrender.   I shall defend more open architectures whatever the cost may be.   I will fight with growing confidence and try to gather like minded warriors around me.    And if,  which I do not for a moment believe, the world or a large part of it were subjugated and Mac affected, then I will find a further land not yet Mac affected and guarded by the Open Source revolution , will carry on the struggle, until, in good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old…

     

    BTW Here is a link to the great Churchill speech I parody at the end of this post – http://audio.theguardian.tv/sys-audio/Guardian/audio/2007/04/20/Churchill.mp3

  • Mobile revolution in perspective

    Some people on the planet feel the need to bring some balance to this debate.   Not that there is much debate.   Everyone seems sure that mobile devices will conquer the planet.   Apps are growing like mushrooms.   Many with less meaningful content than an edible fungus.  This doesn’t stop marketing departments investing in mobile platforms for everything.   Everything.

    Don’t get me wrong.   I am happy that this is leading to some interoperability.   (Not so happy we are wasting a lot of global energy pandering to a very small minority of …well whatever Apple dreams up of, often on its own little island.  We should be talking about “tablet compatible” things, not “iPad” compatible.)   It is great that websites are getting better to navigate from different resolution screens.   I have been a road warrior and smart phone user since the days when this involved carrying a brick in my back pocket and being laughed at in meetings for using it.

    I have done work on a mobile phone.   Back in the days when you could find a phone with a decent keyboard I would even write thoughts like this on one.   But real individual information processing work gets done on a PC.   Unless you are in the business of only reading stuff or killing pigs by throwing birds at them from a slingshot.

    There are some rock solid obstructions to a mobile device being truly capable:  1. Screen resolution.   I struggle with netbooks because the 600 pixel limitation to the height makes getting anything done on the internet difficult.  Even 768 on many laptops is annoying.   2. Screen size.   Some of us are lucky enough to not mind ridiculously small fonts.   Not everyone.   The Galaxy Note is a step in the right direction. 3. Keyboard.  Again netbooks are a good example.  Read reviews and all the complaints people make about smaller keyboards.   For anyone that writes to make their living this is serious.   Virtual keyboards on touch screen never, ever, ever come even close and voice recognition remains a problem in the real world.  4. Multi tasking.   Even if Alt-tab isn’t your second nature, when you are working you are very often multitasking.   I’m not talking about an iPhone finally being able to run essential tasks simultaneously.   I am talking about 5 spreadsheets, 8 browser windows, a business app and a few other things running at the same time because I need to them to put something together.   Even a simple presentation will often demand 6 or 7 software applications running concurrently.  5. Speed.   When we are talking about serious work, the speed of the device is essentially stalling your thought process.   I am annoyed at upgrading to an 18 megapixel DSLR because it takes that much longer for my Core i7, SSD laptop to process the images.  Time is money and mobile devices are wasteful in this respect.  Unless they are a laptop.   Mobile enough!

    The list continues with other major or minor niggles.   “Niggles” being things that bother you.   Like the room being too cold.   Like your chair not being comfortable.   Like all those things you don’t want bothering you when you actually try to get some work done.   For anyone wanting to focus on a task involving the use of technology, a PC will continue to be the best place to get it done.

    Niggle free.

  • Apple doesn’t break the rules; it doesn’t have any!

    What is Apple’s mission statement?

    Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad.

    Seriously.  Not kidding, it is from the Apple website under “Investor Relations”.   If I had written a mission statement like that, even at that project at the end of Year 1 of business studies they would have failed me.    Even the other gem, hidden in the same section isn’t much better:

    Apple is committed to bringing the best personal computing experience to students, educators, creative professionals and consumers around the world through its innovative hardware, software and Internet offerings.

    Yeah right.   That defies all rules of mission statement making.   Pretty sure nobody in the company even knows it.   Apple’s mission statement was probably more like:

    We all do whatever is cool and seems to please the Allmighty Steve Jobs.   He always knows best, even when it doesn’t seem to make sense; he will make it work sooner or later.

    Forget social responsibility (no charity, iKill workers abroad) it is all about profit maximisation.   And now that Jobs is gone a few shareholders are daring to ask whether they might actually have a share of the monumental cash pile at last.    You can only pretend to be emotionally impaired by those times aeons ago when you were cash strapped and even borrowed from Microsoft.    Apple is one of the richest companies in the world.   More than 100 billion in the bank just sitting there for what?   And they don’t even pretend to have some masterplan!

    Forget increasing market share.   They could easily drop prices, increase product range or just buy a few companies and give away something of value like Google does.   Buy Adobe, give away Photoshop or something.   (More or less what they did with the digital video market which they then almost abandoned.)  But no, the ghost of Jobs walks the sleek halls of Apple still.   They still shamelessly do everything they can to maximise profit.   Nothing else.   After all, if everyone has a Mac how could they urge you to “Think Different”?

    But that is no mission statement either.   To cater to weird designer type people and make them feel special.   I made that up but it would still be more accurate than what they have now.    So Macs are stuck at much less than 10% market share globally and iPhones not much more than that, 25% globally for the optimists.   Depending on your mood you can do statistical hoopjumping to consider iPads a threat to the global status quo or not.  To force other technology companies to produce cooler gadgets than the geeky stuff they did so far.   That would show some awareness, some commitment to helping the planet in some way.   It would give us an idea where it might be heading and all that stuff we learnt about missions statements.   We all thought it was really necessary for a well functioning company…

    Sorry to be the party pooper but this doesn’t make sense.   What is the point of this company again?   And without a magician to tell us that the emperor is not naked, how will it pull off any future tricks?

  • Mac vs PC: is anyone ever going to run proper benchmarks again?

    OK, it is a sign of age.   Do you remember back when people actually tested computers for their performance?   I especially fondly remember Charlie White’s heroic efforts.   He is now high up the Mashable food chain and doesn’t “attack” Macs anymore…. heck he writes about them like everyone else.   But who does actually give Apple machines an honest run for their money?   I’m not talking about their business practices, whether they do any charitable donations (they don’t) or kill loads of people in their factories without any serious signs of caring or doing much about it.   This is a techie question, not a social responsibility sermon.

    It is a well established (statistically, theoretically, practically and well…obviously!) that Apple has journalists wrapped around its finger.   It’s i-finger or i-whatever it does.   It gets more coverage for free, more positive coverage and more simply adoring coverage than anyone else.   It gets in more movies than anyone else.   And it doesn’t pay for it.   They are marketing demi-gods.   The only recent mac vs pc test I could find ends up almost equating the two solutions even though the Mac is $450 more expensive!    (To be fair they end the comparison like this: “So, if you love Macs, stay put. For everyone else, the choice is simple: Save your money and buy a PC. It’ll get the job done.” )

    But wait a minute.   These are, for the most part, tools.   Not gadgets but machines we use to get a job done.   Sure most of the iPad lot are just scrolling up and down aimlessly and playing Angry Birds.   But for every 100 PCs out there, at least half are for actually producing something.   In a finite Universe with finite time.   We should care how quickly it gets done.   If you are crunching numbers, running a business, serving a customer, these things matter.   Which is why you don’t see Macs in mission critical environments.   They are not only more expensive; some businesses would pay for the style.   They are also slower.

    I will gloss over the pro Apple arguments.   About a sleeker interface, myths about it being more stable or more safe none of which apply for many years now and especially since Windows 7.  I am talking about performance.   You use Photoshop?   You should care if it takes forever to load an image, or twice as long to execute a plugin effect as an equally priced PC.   You spend all day doing it.   You could be gaining valuable hours of free time.   There are good business reasons why Apples are slower.   Not just because Apple spends all day figuring out how to sell phones, not PCs anymore.   Even seemingly secondary things like hybrid HDD drives have good Windows drivers months or years before they have any compatibility with Macs.   It’s simply not worth the time of any manufacturer to bother doing any research for a company like Apple with such a small hold on worldwide PC sales.   And on top of that, Apple doesn’t make any partner’s life easy of course…

    Back then, even with huge, proven differences in performance of common tasks, Mac fanatics simply refused to change.   Even when they finally conceded that they were slower, much slower, they came back with “yeah, but PCs are ugly“!

    What’s your excuse?

  • The apps you need for your divorce

    I am a happily divorced father of three children of which I have sole custody.  By Greek standards that is crazy unlikely verging on impossible.  Several years later I am glad I never got too worked up about the whole thing.  I also realize that technology played a major part.  Yeah, I know I am plugging all Google products and yes of course if you want to get technical there are other options, but this is the real world.  I have an army of 7-8 phones (including spares and seconds) to maintain.  Stock Android and similar look and feel all over for us. And preinstalled apps wherever I can get them.

    Here are some pointers for those that are in a less relaxed place than me right now:

    1. Google Maps.  This post is continuing on from a presentation I did recently about the Timeline feature in Google Maps which seemed to resonate.  Given permission, Google tracks where you log in from.  You can all share location with each other if you like.  If you connect to a wifi for example it knows where you are.  Or if you have your data connection switched on.  So when you get a law suit claiming that on the 23d of some month and year you can’t remember your daughter fell and hurt her chin, you can easily get reminders.  What is really cool about timeline is that not only does it show you on a map, but it also combines with…
    2. …Google Photos.  Aha, there is that chin on that very same day and it was a minor scratch.  Proof! We also track school reports (just snap), doctor visits (only takes a second.  Snap!) or screen grabs of SMS.  (No need to snap, just make sure it is backing up the ‘screenshots’ folder – you will have to select it.)  Who needs more paper and files around the house?  Snap and throw.  Google Photos offers a mind boggling infinite amount of space for free and has amazing AI tools for searching them instantly.
    3. Google Calendar.  Kids in divorces have everybody shoving agendas down their throats.  Personally I am a soft touch kind of parent.  So it is a widgets on their front screen, with our shared calendar in purple for our shared activities.    I might spend five minutes getting all his basketball games in there for us all to find easily but it is worth it.  If and when he wants to know, it is there waiting for him, right next to the appointment with the orthodontist.
    4. Google Hangouts.  Yes, they use Instagram for their friends, or Messenger or Snapchat or whatever is fashionable.  Which leaves Hangouts, the conveniently preinstalled on every Android phone app, for family.  Unless they look around Settings, it will ping on top of the game they are playing on the phone without destroying their attempt at a record.  If your ex is funny about letting them speak on the phone, use this backdoor.
    5. Google Docs.  It isn’t just about homework.  You also have a million multi page legal documents to work on.  Sometimes you want to share them with your lawyer, sometimes your kids demand to read them.  Again, depending on your parenting style and their maturity you might want the kids to be involved in these documents, to comment, to collaborate, to be able to view if they feel like it sometime at any time in the future, much like….
    6. …Google Drive which is your shared master memory.  Forget saving to physical drives and USB sticks which will get you into trouble sooner or later.  Send those important documents to Drive for future reference.  If you’re lucky, you will archive them and forget them.  If not you might want to dig up those Call Recorder app files which backed up to Drive, or the SMS and call lists in there.
    7. Google Contacts.  I easily export other parents phones from my account to theirs.  No excuses!  YOU call your friend’s mum to arrange that play date!  This also works in reverse as they start saving their friend’s numbers and I can – in emergencies – track down someone in their posse with the damn thing actually switched on.

    I can go on and on with such real world examples of how Google is the backbone of our family.  My kids got Gmail accounts the day they were born.  If it was absolutely necessary I guess I could easily dial in to their Chrome browser history.  Haven’t needed to yet and they will be locking me out of their Gmail accounts soon I hope as they approach puberty and don’t need me helping them with it anymore.  When a phone is confiscated by your ex, lost or broken (as happens with kids, OK, actually I destroy more phones than they do!) we just log in with their Gmail and all apps, games and contacts reappear magically.  For a long time I had all our accounts signed in on my phone for them to play their favorite game when they had to collect chests, feed chickens, collect apples or whatever the current crisis was at the time.  Google assistant is a great way to learn English and a fantastic tool for kids in general.  We share pictures in Photos which is even more important in divorces for making shared happy memories and coming to terms with the past.

    You couldn’t really do all this with any other app ecosystem.  Apple’s is restrictive, lacks many key features, makes you pay for others and has way too many hoops for you to jump through.   Microsoft is no longer in phones and generally tries to sell these sort of solutions to business customers.  So give your kids Gmail accounts, pick up a 150 dollar Chinese Android phone and your family is in business.  All you need to do is remember the passwords.   Well, actually, you don’t even need to that.  Because…

    8. …Google Chrome remembers all passwords.  ; )