[Macworld]

Post your comments for Extended Gmail outage hits Apps admins here

[peetz]

If the reports on the internet are true, the culture at Gmail is one of cool, rather than focusing on producing a top commercial product.
It's not just me. Look what Sergey Solyanik said, when he quit Google:
"This orientation towards cool, but not necessarily useful or essential software really affects the way the software engineering is
done. Everything is pretty much run by the engineering - PMs and testers are conspicuously absent from the process. While they do exist
in theory, there are too few of them to matter. Source: Sergey Solyanik
http://it.toolbox.co...heading-back...
If you look at some of the junk Gmail engineers have come up with in their labs, e.g. snakey games etc. Rather than them focusing on making this product really useable for people who use email for work and business.

Look at that Goggles feature. It seems, when all these Gmail interns get to work at Gmail, they are set loose to make it a playground to come up with fun cool ideas. Look Google, we just want Gmail to work.
So many basic features have been left undone, while you guys come up with fun cool features. What about visual-representation for labels, i.e. folders. That's been undone for years.
Enough cool stuff. Just make Gmail a great email that works.

[peetz]

Here's the link to the Sergey Solyanik expose to the internal cool-gone-mad culture inside Google:
http://it.toolbox.co...microsoft-25755

[MorrisTheCat]

I'm sorry to say this, but it serves these admins right for going with a hosted app service for something as business critical as mail and productivity tools. Google can talk all they want about being reliable and lower cost than the alternatives, but its real world results that matter, and in this regard, Google Apps and Gmail have been mostly a failure, from a business standpoint at least.
I don't care how cost effective it might be to have these services hosted and offsite. There's no accountability. If the CEO of the company wanted to make heads roll for this outage, what is he gonna do? Its not like they can get a Google engineer fired.
The most upsetting aspect about this is that it puts more fuel into Microsofts argument for sysadmins to stick with their proprietary expensive suites and server products. There was some hope that Google would be able to break some of the stranglehold MS has on businesses. If Google hoped that too, then they need to rethink all of this, because this ain't the way to do it.

[kresh]

I've been getting the spinning gear in Mail for my GMail account for 2 days. Every few hours I would try to bring it back online only for it to spin awhile before presenting the offline badge.
Because of the last outage a few months ago I have been migrating away from GMail. Thankfully I have barely noticed that GMail is down, except for the annoyance of looking at the Inbox and seeing the offline badge.

[folklore]

And people wonder why I've always been very skittish about software as a service. It probably makes sense for small businesses (the benefits outweigh the costs) but for medium and enterprise businesses, it's crazy to outsource business critical services like this.