As I wait for Google to restore my e-mail service, I’d like to respond, preemptively, to all the soon-to-be written blog posts about how this Gmail outage proves that web-based applications are not reliable enough to replace desktop programs.
These posts pop up like clockwork each time a web-based provider of e-mail or productivity apps or computing power experiences any downtime. How, they ask, can people rely on any service that prone to outages?
There’s a simple answer to that question. We’ve to rely on services that are prone to outages. All services, whether they live on the internet or on your computer, go down sometimes. In my experience, web-based services are at least as reliable as their computer-based counterparts.
Colleagues who use Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail spend far more time unable to access their e-mail than I ever do. It’s just that every Gmail outage makes national news while each individual outage of a computer-based program makes no news at all.
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