“The pitch is as simple as it is universal: you only need one account (with us!) and you’ll have all your digital needs taken care of. That’s the goal Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Sony – to varying degrees and using strikingly divergent strategies – are all trying to accomplish. As a group, they’re just a selection of the vast hordes of service providers looking to expand their ecosystems and monopolize your time (see the efforts of Evernote, Spotify, and Zynga), but they’re also the only ones big and influential enough to actually fulfill that aspiration. My aim today will be to compare, in terms of features and approach, the ‘access-everything’ accounts on offer from those six biggest companies. Does Google+ let you do more than Facebook? Can the Sony Entertainment Network match wits with Microsoft’s Live services? Let’s find out.”
You only need one account to have all your digital life destroyed by a obscure TOS violation, or to have your life (the real one), indexed and sorted, taken from you if the said corporation sell itself to a rich enough dictatorship (the one that you live), so they can do business as usual in the said country.
The trend of “outsourcing” account management, without any kind of fallback mode, is scary.
still waiting for the rise of self-controlled cloud computing. I do have a computer on the internet you know
What’s preventing you? There has been lots of options for years, now.
sorry if I was vague. by “rise” I mean “rise in popularity” not “rise in my pants”
Fortunately I’m not using *any* of products of theirs.
In-depth, indeed! That pretty much covers it all…