Stop Whining About Google Mail

Seriously? The blogosphere and Twitterverse (and whatever other celestial body references we can make for social media sites) are obsessed and “freaked out” by a second Gmail outage in a short time.

I think it’s an indication of people who’ve never worked for a large company or within an IT infrastructure. As usual, those who grew up getting everything for free, and then complaining if it doesn’t work.

First, some facts. It wasn’t a wide spread outage this time – I had some slowness with contacts, for instance. Second, it’s painfully obvious that most of these people have no experience spending hours a week where email doesn’t work, or having at least one outage a month. And at VERY large companies who’s IT staff supposedly is a crack team. Even more hilarious, the regular outages at IT firms I know about.  Stuff breaks.

I have personal experience working at 1000+ person organizations where mail is out for mornings or afternoons at least a few times a year.

Meet Elmer FUD

But here’s the real FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) behind all of this – there’s a lot of IT people who do not want Google Mail or apps to succeed in the business marketplace, because it threatens their jobs.

There’s a saying – “You can’t convince a man of something that’s against his wallet.” And it’s true. Many in-house IT people (of which many are on social networks) are petrified of the mass outsourcing of core functions because in their view, it’s their job.  Not to mention the purchasing folks who have spent thousands on office, Exchange servers, et all. You can be for darn sure those who have skin in the game are waiting to pounce on everything Google could perceived as doing as a misstep.

Not saying GMail is the perfect answer for everything – but it’s good, and those paying the relatively paltry fee to get Google Apps for business are getting pretty good service. And for the cost/benefit, even if it’s as reliable as your in-house mail service, it can be way cheaper and you’re not dealing with the headaches. And there’s other options too – Gmail is not the only player by far – but housing all this infrastructure in your company is a recipe for expensive disaster.

What are your thoughts? I’m a proponent of the cloud in some cases – it’s served us very, very well. But I’d love to hear your perspective.