Gmail Outage as Instructional Opportunity
September 8, 2009
I try to focus my attention on companies and pundits in the search and content processing sectors. I need to make a slight modification. The GigaOM write up “5 Things We Learned From the Gmail Outage” snagged my attention. I think I see the purpose of the article; that is, provide a semi-oracular spin on a high profile company’s technical problem. If I were younger, I suppose I would adopt a similar tone in an effort to curry favor with the Google and approach a subject that has caught the attention of some Gmail users. The core of the article for me was this comment:
But in the end, the fact of the outage wasn’t nearly as interesting as what it said about Google, about email and about us.
In the best spirit of English 101, Kevin Kelleher uses the fact of Gmail going offline as a way to extract some lessons about life in 2009. The five lessons disturbed me. Let me comment on each, and I don’t want to imply that you should not read the original article. Far from it, you need to go to the water bucket yourself to drink.
First, I don’t like the implication that I have to get used to “outages”. When my family lived in Brazil in the 1950s, we had outages every day. The electricity worked a few hours a day. The water, maybe it was on two or three days a week. One does not get used to outages because outages require fundamental changes in the way one goes about certain tasks. I think it is defeatist to learn that Google cannot deliver a service that does not throw a user’s / customer’s life into a tail spin. Outages are not “good enough”; they are unacceptable. This glib statement irritated me. What if a Gmail contained information for a doctor treating the author’s loved one. Without the information, the doctor muffs the bunny and the author’s loved one dies. Is that something the author will get used to? Probably not too quickly I surmise.
Second, big is bad. Excuse me. The consolidation of computing and information services is moving forward, particularly in the US. “Big is bad” but for whom? Big seems to be the trajectory in the US, and if it were bad, why is bigness accelerating? The notion that “big” – the normal situation in telecommunications, automobiles, insurance, and (my favorite) financial services – is a philosophical message. Reality is different, and I find that taking a company’s technical weakness and making a political statement a weird way to communicate with me. Do something to change the reality; don’t tell me that I learned a lesson.
Finally, chain reactions are part of networks. Nope, chain reactions are a characteristics of nuclear phenomena. A chain reaction triggers a sequence of events that continues until the state of matter changes. A network is a system and failures can cascade. Furthermore failures in network systems can be compartmentalized, remediated, and in smart networks worked around. The chain reaction is a fact of nature. The failure of a network centric system is consequence of careless engineers.
Google has to do better, and I think the lesson the Gmail failure taught me is easy to state: Google has to do better. Google should not be excused, given a free pass because “good enough” or “get used to it” is acceptable. Wrong. Google made itself a dominant outfit. Now it has to live up to its obligation. No one should excuse or make excuses for Google’s lousy engineering.
Stephen Arnold, September 8, 2009
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