I’m not going to say too much about the Gmail outage that occurred this morning – it’s been the talk of the blogosphere, twitterverse and Group mailing lists. It’s pretty much been said before.
I will remind those who use the outage to point out that SaaS is inherently flawed as a concept, that hard drives with Outlook .pst files get fried and that Exchange sometimes fails.
Sure Google need to do some explaining, look at their systems and finally accept that they’ll have to come around and offer more support than just groups, but none of that does anything to negate the fact that on-demand, web based email offers significant benefits to users.
That’s it – I’ll leave the rest to all the other commentators!
Ben Kepes is an analyst, an entrepreneur, a commentator and a business adviser. His business interests include a diverse range of industries from manufacturing to property to technology. As a technology commentator he has a broad presence both in the traditional media and extensively online. Ben covers the convergance of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users. 
“Groups” support is a pain. Google, Symantec, Microsoft offer “peer-to-peer” support but seriously this doesn’t come close to offering a good help desk service.
At least Microsoft offers a comprehensive knowledge base. Google doesn’t get close.