I thought of a lot of different headlines I could use to hammer home the point I'm making in this article, but none seemed to have quite as much impact as that. One billion. 1,000,000,000.
This was also the figure as reported more than two years ago, and I can't seem to find the updated statistic, but it's probably safe to assume it's gone up since then.
I'll reel off a few more staggering figures. Firstly, more than two trillion files are hosted on Google Drive. Beyond that, the professional offering Google provides, G Suite, is used by some six million paying businesses and its educational alternative, G Suite for education, is used by around 160 million people.
But one billion users. That's one account for every seven people on the planet. Considering how much most people resent offering even their email - and, yes, registration is mandatory if you're going to use it - and the limited-to-nonexistent computer access people have in parts of the world, that really is staggering.
Dropbox is lagging behind a bit, but not by much. The little blue box that many of us rely on for professional and personal use alike has a total of some 600 million users, and approximately 13 million of those pay for more storage.
And then, of course, you've got the vast selection of other hosting sites: Amazon's AWS package, MediaFire, OneDrive, Sharepoint, IDrive, and so on and so on and so on...
So, let's be generous and say, for the purpose of argument, that there are 2, maybe 2.5 billion accounts registered on file hosting services around the world. This of course doesn't mean that 2.5 billion people are using file hosting services, but just that there are 2.5 billion accounts. There will be duplicates, dead accounts, people using accounts just for projects, et cetera.
Either way, though, the stats are pretty clear: quite a lot of people use web-based file hosting services or cloud storage. The cloud storage market was deemed to be worth more than $45 billion in 2019, and forecasted to surpass $220 billion by 2027. And business transformation site CloudPro estimated in 2018 that 87 per cent of businesses use some kind of cloud storage.
My question, then, is this: what the hell are the other 13 per cent doing?
A friend of mine who works for a major blue-chip recruitment company (who shall, for obvious reasons, not be named) told me that his team of 10 to 15 people use one pretty important spreadsheet on a daily basis.
The spreadsheet is password-locked, and contains a lot of data, meaning its filesize is substantial (I didn't get an exact figure). It's also routinely used by more than three people on any given day.
And for some godforsaken and totally unknown reason, the powers that be at this company have decided the most efficient way to share the spreadsheet is by emailing it to each other.
This is a company that turns over more than £50 million a year, and the fact that they're still operating on a manual (read: prehistoric) file transfer system is utterly baffling. There's just no argument for emailing a spreadsheet between people when it requires collaborative use. No argument at all. None. Security is likely to be better on something like a Google Sheet, and even if you want to stick to a Microsoft Office file, you can use Dropbox or G Suite and just lock the folder.
That's also not considering the fact that multiple members of this team quite often need to use the sheet at the same time.
If anyone reading this uses any kind of similar protocol in their day-to-day business, whether it's for professional or personal use, I implore you to stop. Please. It's painful for everyone else on your team. If you're the one insisting on it, then rest assured people will be complaining about you.
In so many cases, I imagine the justification will be simple legacy reasons: "this is the way we've always done it, and it works for us". I'm sure people who used smoke signals or carrier pigeons before the invention of the telephone expressed similar sentiments.
There does seem to be this segment of people who use technology that are so unbelievably afraid of the c-word (cloud, that is). And while I'm sure age will factor into it, my personal experience is that it tends to be concerns about security and the reliability of having something backed up in the physical world.
My cousin, for instance, is in his thirties, and ever since the dawn of the iPod Classic, he's had months of music backed up on an external hard drive. And while streaming services like Spotify, Deezer and Apple Music can provide you with a lot more than that on demand, he just doesn't seem to care. His argument is that he has everything he likes, and he can add to it if he wants by buying a song or an album online.
I think there's something there which equates roughly to the "Netflix paradox" - when you have everything to watch, you find yourself wanting to watch nothing - but there does also seem to be a distrust of non-physical storage.
That does make a bit more sense, I suppose. The cloud is an odd and sometimes ethereal thing. Even when you have files stored on a hard drive, there's a tangible, physical link to it; "I lose this piece of metal, then as a result, I lose my Bon Jovi discography". There's logic there. When there's nothing physical tied to a file or a collection, it loses its ability to be lost, and maybe even some of its impact or value as a result. That's why record shops still exist.
But posterity aside, I can guarantee that the "old-fashioned way" is unforgivable when it comes to collaborative working. You're dealing with documents and information that you don't ever want to accidentally lose. So if you're still emailing word documents to each other and adding your initials to the filename with every redraft until it looks like some kind of cipher, then please, just stop. You are part of the problem.
