GMail

The #GoneGoogle meta-revolt

Last post on the Google Guerrillas and I promise I’ll find a new topic to harp on for a while, but just thought you might find it interesting how Google’s viral campaign has turned against them.

As PaidContent reports:

As part of its new campaign to promote Google Apps Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has been encouraging users to Tweet on the benefits of ‘going Google’ under the hashtag ‘Gone Google.’ But with Gmail officially down the hashtag has taken on a new meaning, as a number of users have used it to circulate their complaints.

PaidContent also notes that Microsoft is quietly pushing news of the revolt out there, with COO Kevin Turner pointing to news of the outage to convince current Microsoft customers to stay on board.

More on managing the user revolt:

• Help user-IT relations with a party: So crazy it might just work
• GMail fails, but will Google Guerrillas back down?
• Would Shakespeare slice up the server admin?
• Is your IT department fighting Google guerillas?

GMail fails, but will Google Guerrillas back down?

I just posted yesterday about the dangers of ditching IT for Google, and the Big G makes the point better than I ever could: GMail, the 3rd most popular web e-mail service, went down today for a while, with spotty communication as to why and little information in terms of problem resolution.

Now, GMail and Google’s other services likely have better uptime than many IT organizations, but as the author of TechCrunch’s article noted, Googles Guerrillas were having a tough time:

I use Apps For Domain for everything - my contacts, my email, my todo list, my chat, my documents and more recently, my phone. As soon as it went down, I noticed in less than a second. I am now completely stuck, after a few months of being impressed by how I was able to run my entire life on Google.

It is not just the frontend that is down, but also the backend IMAP and POP servers (Update: they are up, but slow). This is a huge fail for Google, considering how admired they are for all the technology they have built internally to scale out their applications.

Most IT organizations would at least provide prioritization of business critical services, along with a trouble ticketing system to assess what is down where. With GMail, on the rare occasion it does go down, it goes down in a very big way.

Now the question is, will this dissuade any of the Google Guerrillas that recently wanted to chuck IT in favor of a user-ocracy?