Yesterday afternoon, PDT, Gmail crashed, and millions were left without email service, as you probably know. Subsequently Google announced they’d screwed up when moving server resource around. When an operation as big as Google screws up lots of people know about it in a hurry, so an early and humble apology was a good idea.
I can hear those Office and Outlook crazies crowing “See what happens with that cloud stuff. One little problem and business has to stop, whereas with our desk top software we just keep going.”
Well it isn’t quite like that as I’ll explain later.
Yesterday in Small Business Moves to the Cloud we highlighted research results showing UK small businesses are planning moving from desk top software to cloud software in a hurry, for very good reasons – cost, choice, security, flexibility, connectivity.
Should they reconsider, given the failure of Gmail? Not if they look at it this way.
Coincidentally we were held up for a couple of hours last night, by 29 different Microsoft updates. (Ok this is probably unusual. We don’t use the PC regularly, preferring our Macs of course, so there might have been a few months of updates.) All we wanted to do was check some new FOB features in Internet Explorer and Chrome, but the updates held us up, for longer than Gmail was down.
So the question comes to mind – “when were we last held up for any time at all by updates to Firefox, Google Apps, or any web software for that matter”. Never. It just doesn’t happen with cloud computing.
Another question comes to mind – “when did Microsoft last apologize for screwing up”? Never, that I’m aware of.
So far I’ve probably only countered the desk top fans argument about availablity.
To reinforce my argument in favor of the “cloud” I’d like to ask another question.
Why does Microsoft insist on dumping more and more complex software on us, instead of having us use it in the cloud?
Rhetorical question of course.
If they didn’t we wouldn’t need to keep swapping out redundant hardware to get enough resource to run the stuff we aren’t anyway going to use.
If we didn’t the hardware guys would be out of business – or most of them, and Microsoft wouldn’t get all those nice new license fees.
Complexity helps Microsoft drive growth in it’s business with the support of the hardware manufacturers. They’ve an unholy alliance.
Not for long though. Sony has just broken ranks and agreed a deal with Google that’ll see its computers shipped with the Chrome operating system, instead of Windows.
Will this be the start of a landslide?
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- Sony signs Google browser deal (news.bbc.co.uk)
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