Unrealistic expectations and the latest Gmail outage

So Gmail went down again this morning. It's a bit of a bummer, but I keep telling myself that it's OK, since I don't have to actually do anything to make it come back up again. All I have to do is check on the Apps Status page:

This is certainly easier than getting an internal Exchange server sorted out or resurrecting mail provided through an open source solution hosted in house. And for us, most of our users are teaching right now. They can even still access all of their Apps aside from Gmail, so in-class presentations and collaboration can go on.

Twitter, of course, is all abuzz with the latest #gfail and it's already hit Google News, but I have to wonder if we need to simply adjust our expectations a bit and keep this in perspective. I'm not saying we should lower the bar and, obviously if this becomes a chronic problem, then other cloud-based solutions will start looking mighty attractive. However, for a service that is free (or low-cost for businesses) and offers serious collaboration tools beyond email, I find it isn't too hard to bide my time when we hit a service disruption. I certainly couldn't be biding my time and having a bite of lunch if it was my mail server that went down.

If you're reading, this, though, Google, do please get my domain back up and running. I usually only take 10 minutes for lunch.