So, Google Docs had a 30-minute outage today.
This has C|Net saying that the sky is falling:
No matter how brief this outage, this is likely to be a major blow to the growth of cloud computing, as it reminds IT managers of the danger of relying on a unified product to serve all a company’s users. With traditional installed software and local storage, it’s almost impossible for a single outage, outside of a bad operating system upgrade, to affect an entire workforce at once.
Umm … no.
A major service such as Google Docs, which millions of people use around the globe, is a big deal. So going down – even for 30 minutes – is a big deal. Agreed.
But that’s exactly the reason why our response to it is disproportionate to the actual problem.
Consider how many times you’ve had issues with Microsoft Word, or whatever else you use as a word processor. Oh wait, you don’t use anything else (well, most of you). Word refusing to format properly, Word quitting unexpectedly, Word running slowly, Word eating your document. Or Word behaving like a perfectly gentleman, but your PC deciding to eat a document or two for lunch.
Never happened to you? You must the be the luckiest dude on the planet.
But it happens to most of us. And if you add up all the little annoyances and grievances … they crowd out a couple of outages here or there by Google Docs.
At least, that’s my opinion. Yours may differ!