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.
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...