crates - 7:34 am on May 1, 2007 (gmt 0)

"I spent some time recreating my home page and I changed some of the stuff that was in there. It has now reverted back to where it was meaning that I wasted more time!"

I suppose it's Google's fault that you assumed they wouldn't fix their error, and decided to spend a day recreating your interface when they were able to restore your account? Really, when has Google ever let a massive issue go unaddressed for an extensive period of time? If it's happened, it hasn't happened to me.

Look, I'm not saying that it's okay for companies to have catastrophic data failures. But consider the magnitude of Google: the number of users they have using their FREE services, the number of datacenters and servers it takes to provide those services at incredible speeds to those users, and the number of employees it takes to support those datacenters, servers and users.

Now consider how infrequently these services fail... and the fact that very rarely is there a case where the problem isn't rectified in a reasonably short period of time. You don't pay for the services, and yet they just work. Whereas people all around the world pay out the arse for Windows technology (not just the OS- the software running on it as well), only to wait months and months for the "service packs" (read: de-clusterforkification) to get the software to start working as it was originally intended.

For what it's worth, I'd have to say that Google is one of the most impressive companies I've ever seen in terms of keeping operating errors to a minimum, growing their existing services (and increasing the number of available services) at a phenomenal rate of speed, and streamlining/integrating those services for a tight user experience at no cost to those users!

That's not to say that the other services don't have their place in the world: I have to admit that lately, Yahoo has been doing a better job of indexing and prioritizing the most recent content from stuff that's happened in the last few days/weeks.

And MSN's "Live" search is always good for a laugh... so I guess it's got its place in the world too.

I guess my point to you is: if you're getting a service for free, and your business/job depends on the reliability of that service, when your business or job suffers because of your inability to have some contingency plan in the event of that service's failure, it's really nobody's fault but your own.