Twit-Bookin how the GMail Failure may affect Cloud Computing! What do you think?

Ken Auletta: Ominous Clouds

When Gmail went down yesterday afternoon, I called Ken Auletta, who has written about Google for The New Yorker and whose book about the company, “Googled: The End of The World As We Know It,” will be out this fall, to see how he was holding up. Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.

Gmail isn’t working. How are you handling it?

I feel like I’m stranded back in the twentieth century. Gmail has been down at least a couple of times before, and YouTube has been down a couple of times in the past twelve months. This is a menace to Google in the future.

Why is it a “menace”?

Google is betting heavily on something called “cloud computing”—the belief that you won’t want to spend a lot of money on expensive software packages from companies like Microsoft, and instead let Google give you free e-mail and apps and all other kinds of services that they will store on their “cloud.” It will be free, it will be portable, and you’ll have access to it anytime you want on any device. That’s a wonderful idea, abstractly. It’s a twenty-first century idea, abstractly.

But if Gmail goes down, it inevitably undermines that trust that consumers need in order for cloud computing to work. If I don’t trust that I can access my e-mail, documents, or schedule in the Google cloud whenever I want, then I’m going to stay with packaged software. That is the danger of what happened today to a company like Google.

via newyorker.com

WHAT DOES STYLEZ THINK?

Well, unfortunately, many people really don't understand what Cloud Computing is or what impact that it has on them, or how it will impact the future. However, I think that the GMail failure will definitely cause people to kinda rethink, or be cautious about how they use Google's "Cloud Services". You have to remember, the average person, no matter how computer literate or illiterate, usually understand that computers fail. However, as the author pointed out, they TRUST Google to minimize, if not eliminate, failures of their systems. I think some people have this false sense of security that Google, Apple, Microsoft etc are PERFECT! That their services are ALWAYS up 100% of the time, and that if those systems go down, its the end of the world. I think those companies do a great job keeping their systems up 99% to 99.999% of the time, however, people have to understand that means that those systems, in a year, can be down between 5 minutes and over 87 hours!!! So, at some point, they will go down! As long as Google, VMware, Amazon, the Federal Government and all the other services minimize their downtime, and rectify issues swiftly and effectively, users will not take off running! But as long as they are managing expectations, people will not be discouraged!

That is what Stylez thinks, what do you think?

Posted via web from Willie Stylez's posterous