The cutting edge of innovation

I never expected my 70 year-old mother to ride the cutting edge of innovation, nevertheless she's there, living in the cloud, which she embraces enthusiastically. What's that saying about not teaching old dogs new tricks? Maybe you can.

Mom's daily tech is way out there, and you can blame or credit me for lifting her there. Nevertheless she's a willing participant, happily adopting new habits, which in the long run wasn't so difficult once she recognized the benefits. Maybe your mother will, too, if you give her the chance. Mom uses Android phone, Chromebook and Google TV. She lives in the cloud via these Google-powered devices and associated services.

Technology is all about lifestyle, however more highly pronounced in the cloud-connected device era, driven partly by vendors' product philosophies and marketing strategies. Choose any product company at the height of its dominance, and for some even afterwards, there is lifestyle behind them -- Ford, Harley Davidson, IBM, Kodak and Sony, among many, many others. People choosing Linux or Macintosh while the 1990s and early 2000s made lifestyle choices different from the DOS/Windows majority. BlackBerry and Palm Pilot presented connected lifestyles while the past decade. Examples abound.

For mom, the Google cloud lifestyle works so then, though it's nowhere nearly where she started. I bought mom her first computer, a refurbished Gateway laptop, in 1999. She used Windows PCs through 2008, when I shipped her the last iMac G5 produced by Apple. I did this because the Windows lifestyle wasn't working for either of us. She had a terrible experience where in November 2006 Microsoft's "Genuine" tool wrongly flagged her HP PC -- that I had set up and shipped -- as having pirated Windows XP. Occasional malware and other problems led me to offer the iMac.

The Apple lifestyle worked then for mom

The Apple lifestyle worked then for mom, and she often expressed how much she loved her Mac. It worked for me, too. I received much fewer tech-support calls from her. However in other ways, the Apple lifestyle fit poorly. She didn't own iPhone, iPod or digital camera. The Mac wasn't her hub for digital lifestyle -- as Apple cofounder positioned the platform in the beginning of the Millennium. Mom played a few games on her Mac, yet largely the web browser defined her digital lifestyle.

Last year, the iMac's graphics card started to fail. Mom badly needed a new computer, being in a wheelchair and relying on the Mac for information and connection to others. She gets out most every day while summer months, nevertheless she is more apartment-bound while long New England winters. A new Mac didn't fit either of our budgets. Apple demands too much to join the Mac club -- $1,200 starting price for a desktop PC.

Mom as well had to learn new habits, although she already spent most of her life in the browser. She as well switched from Yahoo to Gmail, which better suited using an Android phone. Still, she has expressed satisfaction with the change, with one caveat: Netflix streaming is at times choppy. That's more a hardware problem than issue with Chrome OS.

Google TV was easier for mom to grasp than Chromebook for two reasons that I would never have guessed: Apps and Android. Her Android phone experience made Google TV more intuitive than Chrome OS, which surprised me; I reasoned that the browser would be the more familiar interface. Like as not, nevertheless if you're looking for more out of any computing device, apps and customization matter more -- and these attributes made Google TV easier to use and more familiar to her.

Revue instantly appealed, and now mom moves among Google-OS devices -- Android, Chromebook and Google TV -- depending on context. The stuff that matters to her is available on any of them.

The cloud now

Mom lives in the cloud now. She doesn't have a digital camera; Nexus S is it. Unlike iOS, Android presents sharing options with each photo. So she can snap and share to Facebook, which is her primary social network, because that's where her kids and grandkids hang out. Or wherever else. She doesn't use Chrome for Android beta, however I need to change that. Browser sync across devices is another benefit she could use.