Google Apps: Gmail SLA jury still out
What a difference seven hours and 32 minutes makes!
I asked last week Google Gmail SLA guarantee? and it already being put to the test.
At 6:29am this morning, Fellow ZDNet blogger Phil Waineright said Google Apps in first collapse, recounting “cries of despair” of “Gmail users, who have experienced from 8 to 12 hours of continuous downtime, plus additional knock-on delays to emails that were queued during the downtime.”
Waineright put forth:
Will Google honor the spirit of its SLA and extend the free trial period for an extra seven days for affected customers, or will it stick to the letter and refuse on the basis that customers have not started paying for the service yet? I guess that depends on how much Google wants to be taken seriously as an on-demand business service provider and thus how badly it wants to restore its reputation — a reputation that has just taken a very bad knock.
By 2:01pm, he said Google credits Premier Apps users, restores honor commending Google for “swallowing its pride and rapidly reacting with generosity and humility.”
What transpired over the seven hours and 32 minutes to elicit Waineright’s stamp of approval that “Google has demonstrated that it has the mettle to succeed in the on-demand services marketplace”?
Waineright: “Google contacted me today to confirm the company will credit all signed-up customers of Premier Edition with an extra month's free service.”
Google Apps SLA case closed? One Google email aiming to assuage an investigative reporter is all it takes?
Not so Googley fast!
Joel Geek at Geek.com has come to an opposite conclusion:
I'm an Apps for your Domain user and have to say that this situation is very disturbing. First off, I've been a user since the service was first offered and have never experienced a problem. Now that they've really opened up the service it's interesting that this is the first outage I've seen. Also, if you're not a paying user, an email to tech support will only return automated messages, none of which explain that there's an outage.
Since I rely on my e-mail I upgraded to the premier account for free so that I could talk to a HUMAN about the situation. I was told that they're aware of the problem and are working on it. When I inquired about the new uptime guarantee, I was informed that they're still in the trial period so the guarantee is not in place at this time.
This just proves that while Google is a nice alternative, their corporate offering is not going to unseat Microsoft anytime soon.
Bottom line? The Google Apps SLA jury is still out, maybe even sequestered!
ALSO: Google Apps data risks: Security vs. privacy and Google: Official security strategy for Google Apps and How Google’s new business model hurts GOOG