Submitter

I don’t use Gmail for business, which is a good thing today, given that I have been on the losing end of the intermittent outages that are plaguing Google’s free e-mail service. However, I do use my Gmail account for a variety of reasons — actually, today I was booking travel, so that does kind of count as work — and man is it frustrating to be without your e-mail for even an hour or so.

And since I absolutely refuse to Tweet about my woes, I’ll turn to my old-fashioned, Web 1.x outlet, a blog, to make a couple of points.

• When neo-Luddites (or just fuddy-duddies, if that’s how you care to look at it) crab about bothersome stuff like uptime and redundancy as stumbling blocks on the rush to cloud for basic, backbone services, they actually have a point. That’s not to say my POP mail account hasn’t gone down when I needed it, too, of course. But it’s just a nice feeling to have someone who has to listen to you gripe when something critical breaks.
• There is no such thing as free anything, of course — Google extracts advertising revenue from Gmail, as it does with every other successful initiative it has. But, again, you get what you pay for — Gmail is a darn useful interface, but it has been pretty buggy lately. Of course, if I don’t like it, I can get my money back, I suppose …
• E-mail is not going anywhere as the central form of business communication.

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Sep 1, 2009 10:19 PM Geörgy Martin says:

Yes, I suppose e-mail is right up there with oxygen and e-mail.  Now that’s addiction.

Tags: business continuity, business technology, e-mail and e-mail management, gmail, google, saas

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 at 5:01 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.