I remember the first time I synced a PalmPilot to a computer 12 years ago being amazed at the way in which all of my contacts and calendar entries seemed to stay in tune with each other across both devices. Like many others I spent the obligatory 5 minutes trying to trick the sync process and then an hour or so wondering what this brave new world of possibilities this new capability would offer us. True device independence as our metadata (contacts, calendars, bookmarks) and data (all sorts of files) would get intelligently squirted between devices and kept up to date no matter what we did on each of our devices.

Boy how wrong we all turned out to be. Even after a dozen years, sync still sucks. Yesterday Google announced iPhone-Google Contacts-Google Calendar sync which I was excited to try because of how bad Apple's for pay Mobile Me service has turned out to be for keeping 3 computers and an iPhone up to date with each other. And after a few hours of screwing with it, I'm ready to conclude that Google's sync doesn't seem all that much better.

It may have seemed like magic a dozen years ago, but it's just not that hard of a problem to solve. What confuses me most is why the OS vendors haven't solved this problem all the way from metadata to data and offered it as a part of the OS. It's clear that Apple sort of tried (they still don't have a good story for keeping files current across computers— and using a WebDAV server is not adequate), but initial scaling issues and and to much of a focus on the Jobsian "one man, one shiny box" dictum seems to have kept them from truly embracing the cloud as a viable canonical store for the original copy of everything. And while I hear Microsoft has a nifty utility with Folder Share, true sync has only ever worked well in Outlook/Exchange environments (it's no surprise that Google emulates the Exchange protocol for its iPhone calendar/contact sync). Perhaps Mr Notes Ozzie can change this, but the evidence is not there today.

And so we're all left patching our own solutions out of offerings from vendors big and small: Dropbox for files, Foxmarks for bookmarks, and then some hodge-podge of MobileMe and Google for the rest. Until someone steps up and acquires a bunch of these point solutions (which should be cheap these days) and integrates the whole thing into a cohesive whole (maybe this is the GDrive promise), we'll continue the bad habit of confusing a long view for a short distance in the world of sync.