“GMail. That’s like my briefcase now. It’s free but what if they were to go away? I’d lose all my stuff. Therefore, I can’t let them go away, that’s how they have so much value.”

The Cloud Storage War. Photo taken in Burlington, VT.

That’s when the “cloud” all made business sense to me. Put simply, they have power over your stuff. Five years later, last week, we witnessed that power. Google Mail went down for a few minutes. It caused a crazy panic. It was covered nationally. The Onion lampooned with, “Google Shuts Down Gmail For Two Hours To Show Its Immense Power”. The firm I work at, for example, runs Google Apps. Many of our six thousand clients do too. We were completely crippled.

In the five years that I’ve understood the power of the Cloud has come Dropbox, Box.net, Apple’s iCloud and a Microsoft offering. Dropbox has probably done the best with the functionality/usability of the format, allowing users to seamlessly drag and drop with their desktop-based files and folders.

Google up until now has taken a different approach with both Mail, Docs, Picasa, etc. They have been more web based and more convoluted in the sense of just trying to simply sync files from the desktop. Finally, Google has taken on the Dropbox idea.

From what I can tell from the marketing, it’s like Google Docs with a “drive” app you can download for your desktop, tablet, or phone. iOS version is coming too, but I wouldn’t get excited about that yet. It seems to integrate with Gmail, Google+, and some other Google products. It’s easy to be skeptical about integration with Google however, as it seems they can have stuff all over the map.

Here’s the feature run-down from TechCrunch:

• as expected, users will get 5GB of free storage space
• additional space can be bought, of course, starting at 20GB for $4/month
• Google Drive will be deeply integrated into Google Docs. Indeed, Google calls it the “next evolution” of Google Docs.
• the web-based file viewer will be able to handle 30 file types, including Photoshop, Illustrator and HD video
• PC, Mac and Android apps will launch today. An iOS app will launch in the coming weeks.
• Google promises a 99.9% uptime
• there will be a focus on search, including some support for OCR and image recognition

You will definitely learn more about the Steve Jobs that you’ve heard about. The charisma. The obsession with creating amazing products. There is also no shortage of stories about him being a huge asshole. Anyone who has followed the tech industry in the past 30 years has heard a few of these stories. Hell, the fact Jobs could be an enormous dick was taught to me back in high school. My PASCAL class watched “Pirates of Silicon Valley” in my freshman year back in the Spring of 1999.

Take these kind of stories out of context, you might think that you can become rich and famous by being an overly emotional jerk. I mean, you can, sort of, just look at Jersey Shore. Pretty sure Mike the Situation has a Range Rover and a few nice watches. But to leave a legacy of creating things that benefit millions of people’s lives, that’s a whole other story.

So what you really get from the Isaacson’s book is that Steve Jobs was intense. And this is most evident and important  in his ability to focus. Jobs had relentless focus. I’ve put together five quotes on focus from Jobs as well as a couple quotes from Issacson that help explain Steve.

Issacson on Steve Jobs and His Ability to Focus:

“Job’s Intensity was also evident in his ability to focus. He would set priorities, aim his laser attention on them, and filter out distractions. If something engaged him – the user interface for the original Macintosh, the design of the iPod and iPhone, getting music companies into the iTunes Store – he was relentless.”

 ”He attributed his ability to focus and his love of simplicity to his Zen training. It honed his appreciation for intution, showed him how to filter out anything that was distracting or unnecessary, and nurtured in him an aesthetic based on minimalism.”

Three Quotes From The Man Himself:

“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.”

“That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

“We’re always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.”

And couple more Steve Jobs quotes for good fun:

“I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

“Real artists ship.”