Gmail: A Cloudy Day
October 18, 2008
Earlier today I couldn’t access my Google email account. When I give lectures about Google, I like to create a stateful session, and Gmail delivers that. But no joy. I just checked my trusty newsreader and saw this InfoWorld article “Extended Gmail Outage Hits Apps Admins”. You can read the story here. Google announced on October 16, 2008, at 5 pm Eastern that Gmail was not Googley. I find it amusing that Googley super engineers have to admit that their Googley code is not Googley. Believe me, this is bad news for the GOOG. When its engineering goes walkabout, the edifice reminds me of a Roman wall that is crumbling a tiny chunk at a time. The original Roman craftspeople are long gone, and the repairs are made by craftspeople from a different era. Google operates on Internet time, so the chronological reference works out just about right in my opinion. Juan Carlos Perez’s article is a beefy devil, stuffed with details about earlier outages, Google’s response, and some well deserved skepticism about cloud based services. I wish Google had been monitoring my demos today. I wanted to show the recipe app, the air travel app, and the Google patent search not retrieving an important invention by Larry Page. Without Cyrus telling folks that I am inventing Google services and without my statement Gmail session, my talk wasn’t the fun it was supposed to be. Maybe next time?
Stephen Arnold, October 18, 2008
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