Google's two fingers at email users, cloud computing adopters

Last Tuesday morning, Google's Gmail service went down for two and a half hours.

During that period, and for the rest of the day, no-one from Google was available for any kind of comment, communication or off-the-record chat. In Ireland, Google's PR company, MKC, also pulled the shutters down. There was no context given, no mitigating factors offered. All queries were met by the direction to "check the official Google blog". But the only thing on the blog that day (for the entire day) was a couple of paragraphs saying that Gmail was down and that they didn't know why.

The clear message from Google and its agents was: 'we don't have to answer to anyone for this. Besides, Gmail is free. So thank you and goodnight.'

Speaking that day on Today FM's The Last Word, I described Google's approach as arrogant and similar to Ryanair's. (When Ryanair cancels a flight and you're stuck in the airport, it's impossible to get information from them. The same thing happens with Google, apparently, when its key services go down.)

There must now be a growing worry about the non-accountability and non-transparency of Google. In an era when the company is pushing the importance of cloud computing, being unavailable and unaccountable when an important function of cloud computing -- email -- goes down, is not on.

Add to this the arrogance of the communications policy -- "we don't need to let anyone know what's going on" -- and there's a serious problem a-brewing.

In fairness to the company, it is true that nobody forces us to use Google. There are alternatives for almost every service it offers. But let's face it -- Google has almost become a utility at this point.

People have being giving out about Google becoming the new Microsoft for some time. This lack of communications on Google's part hasn't done the company any favours.

Comments

[Cronan]

By the way Gmail is not free, it is paid for by advertising revenue - just a different business model.

[Francis Mahon]

Would an informative press release from Google, telling us that server X at datacenter Y was causing the outage have fixed the problem any faster?

One comment I made, which touched something of a nerve, is that the majority of people hit by the outage were people reading their personal email on company time. While there were many parodies along the lines of "Productivity Soars As Google Breaks", there is at least a seed of truth in this assertion.

[Adrian]

Francis,

Yes it would have.

When your plane is delayed for three hours, it shows more respect when the airline desk tells you that there has been a fault with the engine, as opposed to saying: "sorry, we're closed for comment. Bye!"

[Supra Footwear]

Genius only means hard-working all one's life.