Wasn't Office 365 released a few weeks ago? Not off to a good start. I feel bad for corporate users who are stuck with that junk as their toolkit. I wish this were enough to convince people that they don't need Word or Excel – they just think they do. (They definitely don't need PowerPoint.)
And Microsoft has proven to its customers that the Cloud is a toy and not reliable enough for business-critical systems, so everything should return to the (Mcrosoft-dominated and less competitive) status quo.
Maybe it's just accidental downtime. But Microsoft is not exactly competitive in the cloud computing world (unless you need to run Windows apps) - I don't think it's in their interests for this movement to succeed in the business world.
Why is it better to host your own? Do you honestly believe a single cheap server running Exchange 2003 in an unlocked closet of an office secured with Kwikset locks, running on grid power with maybe a 5-minute UPS but definitely no generators, with maybe a single T1 but more likely business DSL, with no alternate location to fail over to, serviced by a company who might not be able to schedule a tech to deal with you for 5+ hours IF you're calling 8am-5pm on a weekday, is more reliable than a company like Google?
I'm not exaggerating. This is really what small business IT looks like.
If you have the money to do at least 2 geographically separate datacenters properly, secure them with guards, cameras, and biometric or at least electronic access controls, get redundant backbone connections from different Tier 1 providers, and you have enough talent to develop appropriate processes/procedures as well as properly identify and hire other talented people, and you can pay them enough to keep them happy and your equipment modern and functioning, then congratulations, host your own. But if you meet these criteria, you are more likely to be a competitor to Google than a consumer.
/rant. Sorry. All this talk about how the cloud is too risky for businesses drives me up the wall. I understand that it feels good to be responsible for your own failures, but when you are a business, it is not about what feels good, it's about what works.
That is not true. When Google Apps don't work they just don't update their status page and ignore users. Last time I had to fight on forums (with other people) to convince Google guys that Google Docs was reporting 404 for many files. Finally the problem was fixed, but status page was never updated.
Let me understand this logic: A lot users cannot use Google Apps but since there are some user for whom the service works Google can say "100% uptime" - since problem is in a single data center.
That is reason 37signals kicks ass: today some users had issues updating posts (I was not affected) but they said that on the status page.
Cloud service are important for some companies. Not an "ad clicking playground".
Apologize for being sarcastic and angry: I just hit me in nerves when I see somebody saying how Google Apps are great when they are not and my business suffered a lot because of their "prima donna" behavior.
I don't know what the criteria for calculating uptime is, but I know that if you have 1 billion users, if every time more than 2 of yours users can't reach your servers you consider that downtime, you'd probably be 100% down. If you know how many Google Apps users couldn't use the apps and that number was substantial, you have a point. But if you have no idea how many people had that problem, it is possible that the number was very small and that you were just unlucky. Personally, I've found all of Google's services very dependable.
> A lot users cannot use Google Apps but since there are some user for whom the service works Google can say "100% uptime"
Complex systems like Office 365 or Google Apps very rarely go down completely. Let's say you have a million users using the system for one hour. One of them can't get access to anything in the system. In this hour, you can consider the system had an uptime of 99.9999%.
It's often more complicated, as the users can get access to parts of the system while others show missing or outdated information or some functionality doesn't work.
I too get frustrated by Google's attitude sometimes, but let's face it: they serve a lot of people. It wouldn't be practical to offer human assistance and, if they did, you'd end up waiting for hours until you got to a knowledgeable human being.
Dito provides Google Apps for Business™ deployment, change management, integration, supporting services, and products to organizations of all sizes. As a leading Google Apps Authorized Reseller and a Google Referred Training Partner, we have the experience and expertise to handle your Google Apps needs.
So I can't state facts about a product I believe in, without disclosing my interests? I am not acting as a journalist, and I don't hide my affiliations. I disagree that I need to put a disclaimer on every comment I make. the information you quoted was very easy to find. You are the one being unfriendly.
Microsoft fans (just like any other) consider any unfavorable comment about any Microsoft product (or any favorable comment about any competitor) a personal attack. Since the company is so huge, has so many products and competes with so many companies, you have to either watch your words carefully or stop caring for their hurt feelings.
I'm not a "Microsoft fan", I'm just not a "Google fan" either. As it happens, I have clients who decided to use Google Docs in recent months, and I can attest that while they may have had a server running 99.984% of the time, they certainly did not have a useful, working service 99.984% of the time for us, so I found the comment misleading.
Given that the person I replied to has recently made several short posts containing obvious and often unsupported Google advocacy, I also found his posts dubiously motivated. I'd prefer not to get into some extensive meta-discussion here, I just don't want to encourage that sort of behaviour, and apparently neither do several other people who have since upvoted my original comment. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll go back to posting more constructive things instead...
Oh so your personal experience trumps Google's published uptime? Got it. My bad. I am a Google "advocate" but I state facts. My affiliations don't matter. Again, you are off base to suggest I disclose affiliations in comments on a news aggregator site. That isn't even logical or reasonable. If I was a blogger writing a story it would be a good idea to disclose things of this nature, but I'm not blogging.
> Oh so your personal experience trumps Google's published uptime?
If you'd like to give a rigorous definition of that "uptime" figure, I imagine we could work out the probability of my experience on all those different occasions, working with several different groups in several different places, happening by chance despite the true uptime figure still being 99.984%.
Right now, it fails the credibility test. That uptime gives you about an hour and a half of downtime per year on average. I don't think we managed a single meeting in the past year without someone in the room having trouble using the software in one way or another.
> I don't think we managed a single meeting in the past year without someone in the room having trouble using the software in one way or another.
You must have another very serious problem. This doesn't look like any past experience I heard of. I have been relying heavily on Google applications since 2005 and, in those years, had only one minor glitch when setting up my wife's company corporate mail - an account I couldn't create for some time.
That is possible, of course. However, I would point out that these meetings were attended by a whole team of contractors, each with their own computers configured with their own choice of OS and browser. Moreover, they were held in a variety of different locations, and indeed across several different locations at once via teleconference on some occasions. In other words, it wasn't one very serious problem, it was probably a whole bunch of little problems that caused specific features to be inaccessible to certain locations or not to work properly on specific client platforms during a particular period. (Before anyone jumps in, clearly everyone's Internet connections were fine during the teleconferences, because we were using Internet-based conference software to run them...)
My point is only that it's a bit rich to claim a 99.984% uptime based, presumably, on having servers available, if the code that is running on those servers isn't properly quality controlled so that customers can actually use it to do real work. Just because most of the people on the team can connect fine, it still screws up the meeting if a few others can't follow along. Just because people looking at the spreadsheet in Firefox and Chrome can update it, it doesn't help if the guys using IE can't see the changes.
To get to the 99.984% number, 160 people out of every million users would have no access to the application on any given moment. The number doesn't look that inflated. Most of the time, our (disclaimer: I don't work for Google, but I host a couple web apps) stuff just works.
> has recently made several short posts containing obvious and often unsupported Google advocacy,
Disclaimer: I don't work for Google. I don't particularly like or dislike them either - I use their services and I am more or less happy with them. It's only fair to say I don't like Microsoft that much either - I have been a Windows user and developer for a good part of my career and I know how bad their software really is. Their business practices are also plain disgusting.
please dont tell people to disclose things about themselves that are available in their profile, especially when the accuser provides no information whatsoever on their background. i think google apps is great. i sell it too. i'm not acting as a journalist on here and i dont need to be objective or disclose affiliations.
They have been in operation for a month or so. Give them time. With two major incidents reported since they started, they are certainly not wasting time.
