Several weeks ago I praised Google Desktop. I praised this service because it saved me time finding old emails. The service was brillant and fast.

Unfortunately, as often happens in life, with the "good" came the "bad." Namely Google Desktop increaslingly became a huge time waster everytime I attempted to open Outlook. Just this morning I could not open my Outlook and had to switch to our corporate Web Mail service (what a lifesaver by the way) in order to download my early morning load of 150 plus emails. Today might have been an extreme, but recently the delay has been three to 7 minutes or more.

As good as the program was for retieval, the aggravation factor of having to wait to open email outweighed the benefits of the software.

Before parting with you for the weekend, today's experience reminded me of my experiment with a one time software called Pointcast. Pointcast, as I have pointed out in an earlier post, was a very hot product in 1996-1997 that popularized the concept of "push" in the Internet World. The service would literally "push" specific information to you and as stated, was the rage for about 15 months. What killed Pointcast more than anything else was that once loaded, it totally dominated your computer. I remember clearly that my computer used to bounce while Pointcast was doing its daily download gyrations. I must say that Google Desktop causes gyrations too, but not as bad, upon each boot up. At least it was easy to drop Google Desktop --- one command and it was gone. Pointcast was hard to kill. I remember that one of our tech team had to spend hours cleaning it off of my computer.

A final point: when you drop Google Desktop, Google offers a questionnaire about why you are terminating. There were about 8 choices ---I of course answered that the service was causing huge delays.

I am saddened to have dropped Google Desktop. It is a fabulous service. Now if they could only make it be prompt and to behave!