EDIT: A reader has pointed out this this is all based on mistaken assumptions about things.  Pretend I never wrote it.

So I think I see how Apple is going to fall out of favor with me, and how Google is going to be my computing environment of choice as their whole operating system thing grows.

Last night I tried to get some pictures off of Rando Calrisian’s computer. I knew they were in his iPhoto, so I plugged a flash drive into his computer and navigated in the Finder to where the photos should be. But instead of the .jpg files I was looking for, I found one big 4.3 GB file called iPhoto library. That tells me that iPhoto holds all of the pictures in there, locking them up, instead of just in a directory somewhere.

When I got my first MacBook in May of 2007, I noticed that there were certain other things that I couldn’t do for no other reason that so that the program was trying to keep me locked into their way of doing things. Getting a photo is one example. For another, try exporting an MP3 file of the song you just made in Garageband.

If Google keeps it simple and lets me handle my files and move them around however I need to, then they’re going to be my computing environment of choice as their operating system grows more and more ubiquitous.