Windows Live FolderShare: unacceptable 3-day outage
Update 6/17/08 12:00 EDT: The FolderShare blog now reports the outage will last no longer than eight hours, down from the planned three days. Glad the madness is over. Although it's a significant improvement, one day is still too long and we'd like to know why downtime is required.
Microsoft's FolderShare is a great service for synchronizing files across computers. As with any backup service, reliability is a critical user requirement for FolderShare. For this reason, I was rather shocked to learn of an planned three-day service outage starting tomorrow evening.
What's Microsoft thinking by bringing down the service for such a long time? Zoliblog comments:
Such outage would be unacceptable from any service provider - except apparently from Microsoft...
When Salesforce, Twitter, or Amazon go down for hours, it's big news. Although FolderShare's user base is small compared to those services, we're talking about huge Microsoft, which should have the ability to manage downtime more effectively.
Users are attracted to services such as FolderShare for two reasons: useful features and the promise of always-on reliability. Remove reliability from the equation and the service's value plummets.
FolderShare, three days is unacceptable and your poor explanation makes it worse.