Thursday, November 3, 2011

If it isn't easy, it won't get done (or used)

I had planned on making a blog entry describing how to map my SkyDrive to a local drive letter. As it turns out, there are many blog entries describing the same thing. Search for yourselves and you'll have no problem finding instructions. Most instructions I've found involve getting your alphanumeric ID for the folder in question and then changing the mapping text to some URL involving docs.live.com or something similar. Then, perhaps you change forward slashes to backslashes and remove https and add a ^2Documents or some similar text and are you really going to do this? THEN, I scroll down to read comments on these write-ups only to find users saying that (1) it didn't work and/or (2) it is so slow that the user gave up or removed the mapping.

All of this, mind you, to map 25GB of storage to a local drive. I'm a fairly technical user and I have chosen not to bother with it. I can only assume that most non-technical users won't bother.

So, I shifted gears and thought I'd check out the price of USB flash drive storage. Naturally, I'm working off the assumption that I want easy access to some amount of storage, which theoretically caused my need to map that drive in the first place. As of today, I can go to a big-box store and get an 8GB flash drive for $10. Personally, the bigger problem will be keeping up with the flash drive rather than finding the $10 for 8GB of storage. That's a whole other matter.

For history's sake, I wanted to see how much prices had dropped over the years. Here's a Black Friday ad from 2008 where I can get a super deal of 8GB for about $20. Mind you, this was Black Friday and the retail price ($10 on 11/4/11) was $50 about 3 years ago.

Even more interesting was a look back at a 1996 Best Buy flyer. USRobotics 33.6 modem for $160? You bet! $130 for a 16MB memory upgrade. $400 (after $30 mail-in rebate) for a 3.1 GB hard drive. $70 for a Uniden 30-message pager. I wore a pager at one time! Would kids today even get the Dr. Beeper references in Caddyshack?

Ah, I digress... but I'm not mapping my SkyDrive to a local drive - not today, anyway.

2 comments:

Marty Park said...

to solutions... use Microsoft Document Connection tool to drag and drop files to SkyDrive... or Use Live MESH to do the same thing. Both work pretty well for that "drag and drop" feel that it seems you are looking for.

or... Box.net (pretty awesome) ... or DropBox...

Jody said...

I had heard others ask about mapping a drive but haven't found myself in desperate need as of yet. I knew there were multiple ways but am still not sure of the best or easiest options... isn't Microsoft Doc Connection a "Mac" thing? :)