The Life of a Silicon Valley Rockstar

Amazon.com suffered outages on June 6th and 9th. Worst case scenario, you can’t spend your hard-earned money on books and trinkets. However an outage in the SaaS world could have widespread economic impact both for individual companies and the economy as a whole. Google had just such an outage earlier this week. …and it wasn’t the first time

Google wants companies to bring all their tools to the google cloud. From Microsoft Office replacements to email and who knows what other enterprise apps are next. It’s a great idea and leveraging the great power of the Google datacenter sounds great… until it breaks. How does a CFO explain to wall street that they missed their numbers because some cloud app had an outage at quarter end?

It’s not just limited to Google. Microsoft has a similiar solution that includes a limited version of Office Communications Server, Exchange and Sharepoint in their HMC 4.5 offering. That said, somehow I trust Microsoft knows how to keep Exchange running more than I trust Google to keep a hurried app designed for both individuals and coroporations up and running at 5 nines. Part of the problem is Google tries to be everything to everyone. All of its apps are directed to all classes of users from individuals through enterprise. Different classes of users have different needs, different requirements and different tolerances for learning curve. Simply put there is no single solution for everyone. Despite the hype, until Google realizes this they’re doomed to be a novelty in the business market.

Google, try not to fail, we’re all watching –