Last week, Tim O’Reilly

posted a piece about GMail that I overlooked, though many blogs I read referred to it. But it’s just the title that’s misleading - the piece itself is excellent. O’Reilly’s The Fuss About Gmail and Privacy: Nine Reasons Why It’s Bogus is about MUCH more than the privacy concerns, it’s about the whole thing that GMail represents. “Pioneers like Google are remaking the computing industry before our eyes. Google of course isn’t one computer — it’s a hundred thousand computers, by report — but to the user, it appears as one. Our personal computers, our phones, and even our cars, increasingly need to be thought of as access and local storage devices. The services that matter are all going to run on the global virtual computer that the internet is becoming.”