Why All In Google & The Cloud

I get asked on a regular basis why I put everything in the cloud, live in the browser, and keep nothing on a hard drive, and why I rely so heavily on Google to make most of this happen?

My decision matrix goes like this:

The more I put in to the cloud the greater the efficiencies I gain from collaboration and sharing.

The more I use one vendor for most of what I do in the cloud the greater the interoperability of all of the things that I do with their software. And the more interoperability I have the greater the collaboration and efficiency I gain. 

More cloud, more one vendor, greater collaboration and efficiency.

What's the downside?

The more I put in the cloud, take if off of my shielded and deeply guarded hard drive, the greater the potential risk that it might fall into the wrong hands, either through some cloud security breach or just some dumb mistake on my part.

The more I use one vendor the more sole source risk that I have. If they go south, I'm screwed.

Which looks something like this as a matrix:

From my perspective on security, my business is an open book, we share everything, talk about everything, open source most code, etc. We don't have a scarcity mentality. We want to crowd source ideas, not stew away in the basement on secret potions. And personally I am just not that exciting - my greatest security is that whoever decides to snoop on me will die of boredom. In other words security isn't a big concern for me, whereas, efficiency and collaboration are huge!

And,  with regards to using one vendor or multiples, call me naive, but I am a software guy, if Google or any other software vendor is letting me down, or looks to be missing the boat, I will know it before it becomes a problem and I will pickup my stuff and get on the next great cloud ship that comes by. Sole source does not scare me, whereas being able to click on an attachment, save it to Drive and share it with my colleagues in less time than it takes to write this sentence is real important to me.

That's why I'm all in cloud and why I use Google for most of it. But this is my matrix. I am sure there are other flavours and situations that need to be applied to it. By no means is my choice right for everyone, I just think everyone should make an informed choice and not react to opinion and hype.