Google

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?

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:

With data centers, Microsoft more ‘open kimono’ than Google

Google's floating data center schema

Google’s become known for being willing to try almost anything when it comes to the data center: The Internet giant’s re-vitalized small Iowa towns, designed and commissioned its own custom hardware and even floated the idea of a sea-based data center (Mark Fontecchio dissected that strategy in a blog post).

One strategy the big G hasn’t been willing to try however is transparency, according to New York Times reporter Ashlee Vance:

No one really knows how effective Google’s strategy is. The secretive company releases precious little information about its internal operations. Maybe it saves vast amounts of money by fine-tuning a super-efficient data center. Or maybe the “must-be-invented here” method adds a lot of cost and complexity to Google’s infrastructure.

Microsoft doesn’t seem terribly worried about Google’s eccentric methods. It continues to buy systems from companies like Dell, SGI and Cisco Systems, as it builds out some of the biggest data centers on the planet.

“I can’t say how we compare to Google,” said Debra Chrapaty, Microsoft’s vice president in charge of the company’s infrastructure. “I really haven’t seen them be as ‘open kimono’ as we have been.”

Microsoft, more open and transparent than Google? It can happen, apparently. And if Google’s talking about putting data centers on a boat, Microsoft seems prepared to take them on the road. Chrapaty said Redmond’s considering ditching buildings altogether, putting data-centers-in-a-box out in the open. That would make them cheaper to deploy, if perhaps a bit more exposed, and also raises the possibility of nomadic data centers, traveling from tax haven to tax haven as local legislators try to lure high tech firms.

Sound far fetched? Talk to Quincy, Washington, which lost Microsoft’s Azure data centers to San Antonio for just that reason. Make the data centers more portable, and who knows what will come of it.

Some ITKnowledgeExchange Data Center Resources:

• Data center facilities pro blog
• Mainframe Propeller Head
• Server Farming
• Adventures in Data Center Automation