Google Apps downtime
Posted by Nick Mehta on Fri, Aug 08, 2008 @ 09:29 PM
As I've written before, I find it amusing how my brethren in Silicon Valley think Microsoft is dead and that Google will inevitably win in the business software world. While I don't think you can ever underestimate Google, given the talent of the team that they've assembled (it truly is remarkable), I also don't think Microsoft will just go quietly into the night.
In particular, I think Google will end up having to learn how different the challenge is to sell paid software to businesses versus giving free (ad-supported) software to consumers. While I have no doubt that they will figure it out, it will certainly take time.
Some of the recent outages Google Apps (Google's enterprise email/productivity offering) has had illustrate these growing pains. As IDG pointed out in its article on the subject, the customer outrage was about the response and communication from Google as much as it was about the downtime itself:
In the main Google Apps Discussion Group thread devoted to this incident, administrators complained loudly about the length of the outage and the lack of status update details offered by Google officials ...
"Seriously... It has been two hours. Can you provide us with another update? For a company with your reputation, I'm absolutely shocked at the apparent absence of customer service," wrote a Google Apps administrator on the discussion forum on Wednesday. "This amount of down time is unacceptable."
Phil Wainewright wrote a great post on ZDNet questioning whether Google's corporate culture is conducive to building enterprise technology. He quotes the resignation announcement of engineer Sergey Solyanik from Google, who talked about some of the challenges Google faces in the enterprise.
"[T]he culture at Google values "coolness" tremendously, and the quality of service not as much. At least in the places where I worked. Since I've been an infrastructure person for most of my life, I value reliability far, far more than "coolness", so I could never really learn to love the technical work I was doing at Google."
Knowing many folks at Google myself, I think this characterization is unfair. They value user experience as much as any company I've ever met. However, I do think there are some unique aspects to the business technology world that Google is learning as it grows.