Why You Can't Trust Google
If, like our little company, you run your business using Google Apps, you're playing with fire. For time and again, the company has proven that despite all its talk, its offerings are as unreliable as those of any other service provider.
Context & Ripple Effects
GigaOM's warning lands on a day of fresh Gmail downtime picked up by The Next Web and WSJ's Digits, and it extends an argument the press has been running for years: CNN flagged how Google can make or break a company back in 2006, Forbes warned in 2007 that lost trust would crumble the company, and December 2008's "In Google we trust?" pressed the same nerve.
What makes this installment sharper is timing — it follows Business Week's May 2009 look at what was holding Google Apps back, where reliability was already the sticking point for enterprise buyers. The syndicated counterpoint matters too: Digits argues Gmail is still more reliable than many corporate email systems, so the debate is now about measured uptime versus trust rhetoric.
First-order effects
- Businesses running their operations on Google Apps absorb another outage with no recourse beyond waiting, sharpening the question of whether mission-critical mail belongs on a consumer-grade service contract.
Second-order effects
- Rivals selling traditional corporate email and on-premises systems gain ready-made sales ammunition against Google Apps, while defenders like Digits push the comparison onto published reliability statistics rather than brand reputation.
Third-order effects
- If outages keep punctuating the adoption curve, enterprise acceptance of hosted applications will hinge on verifiable service-level commitments and third-party uptime measurement rather than a vendor's halo — trust becoming infrastructure to be audited, not assumed.
The trend: Cloud application trust is migrating from brand reputation toward measured, auditable uptime, with each Gmail outage forcing Google to defend its reliability record against both critics and corporate-email incumbents.