Google Apps

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?

Is your IT department fighting Google guerillas?

Google’s “Go Google” campaign is well underway, having kicked off at the beginning of the month with a series of plus-sized billboards in strategic cities, the now almost mandatory Twitter hashtag campaign and some major customer announcements, including Motorola’s mobile devices unit. The must cunning strike, however, might be a series of cheeky, innocuous-seeming posters:

It’s not quite inciting an all-out user revolt, but anonymous postering, cryptic typewriter text and the imperative demands all break the mold in how IT projects are usually handled: It’s more V for Vendetta than white paper analysis and staged roll outs.

Have you felt the heat from users? Does it strike you as a cry for freedom from clunky, expensive apps or a call to IT anarchy?  I’m curious as to your thoughts, either in the comments below, to michael@itknowledgeexchange.com, or on Twitter at @morisy. In the meantime, perhaps V himself can give voice to those guerrilla user’s demands: