Two items jumped out at me this week. First, Francine Hardaway’s post on being an early adopter, “Do You Write in the Cloud?” and second, this New York Times story about Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter.
Hardaway, a serial entrepreneur and founder of Stealthmode Partners talks about how she and other bloggers compose their text. Mashable‘s Pete Cashmore, along with Buzzmachine’s Jeff Jarvis and Gina Trapani all write in the cloud. Hardaway either writes directly in Gmail or sends one to Posterous from her Gmail account. If there is a bad wifi connection, she uses Evernote and synchs it to the cloud before moving it to WordPress. (Am I the only one who composes directly into WordPress?)
The main point here is that Hardaway illustrates how she was ahead of the curve each time, and was able to show successfully that you could still think and write using the latest “newfangled” tech–whether a manual typewriter or a word processor. Hardaway recollects:
“…50 years ago, I started composing on a manual typewriter when most other people composed in longhand and transcribed. Many famous authors wrote in longhand their entire lives. People thought I was crazy for going straight to the typewriter. But I’ve gone seamlessly from the typewriter to the word processor (we could dictate into a Digital Equipment Corporation word processor in the Maricopa Community Colleges in the 70s, when I was a professor.) They thought I was crazy for dictating instead of typing when I did that.”
All of this was sloshing around in my brain when I came upon the aforementioned story of Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter. McCarthy is the author of a number of bestselling books, including the recent “The Road“–now a movie, and “All the Pretty Horses,” among many other award winners. How did he compose his text? On a portable Olivetti typewriter he bought at a pawn shop in 1963. He moved on from long hand, but after that he just stopped.
We’re talking about two ends of the spectrum. The early early adopter. And the … well, I don’t think we can call Cormac McCarthy a late adopter now can we? Of course, most people are somewhere in the middle. Enterprises are managing an influx of data that is based on what would be considered the median behavior–a need to store all manner of files, from Office documents to family snapshots to the latest Lady Gaga download. Oftentimes, the response is to try to ignore the problem. More and more files are shoved onto expensive primary storage. Suddenly, the problem reaches massive proportions and emergency measures are taken, rather than a well thought out tiering/deduplication plan or a move to a reliable cloud storage platform. But I digress. The main question here is, what kind of adopter are you? And what are the strengths and weaknesses of each approach?
