Global Design And Business

GMail service yesterday had performance problems for a few hours worldwide. Although users could read the emails in her inbox, a message warning them of the impossibility of accessing the address book.

Within a month, is the second time that GMail has problems after the September 1 to fall during service hours, after you disconnect overloaded some servers for maintenance.

The fall of 1 September was described by Google as “a serious problem, and affected millions of users for two hours. Further down this year, in February, also Gramil stopped working a few hours.

So far Google has not offered any official explanation on the latest incident. Only yesterday announced their support page that acknowledged the problem and was working to resolve it. In the absence of official explanation, many users turned to Twitter and Facebook to give an account of the incident and discuss their impressions.

There is speculation again with an overload on the servers. But beyond a possible death by success, somebody asks whether Google should not take a break in their continuous quest to launch new products, and spend more time and resources to consolidate its most popular services used daily by millions of users , like GMail or Google News, which also has had problems this week.

But the repeated failures of GMail can begin to become a serious problem for the reputation of Google not so much between individual users (fortunately for Google, few are raised back to Hotmail), but in the corporate market. Remember that many companies are customers of Google Apps suite of applications that includes Gmail own more Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Sites, and other office tools.

For example, the prestige blogger Om Malik writes on his blog GigaOm that work with Google Apps is equivalent to “playing with fire.” Again and again, says Malik, Google has proved that its offering of enterprise software is less reliable than other companies, hurting the work processes of your company.

His tantrum is justifiable given that your company is paying customer of Google Apps. For Mailik is a mistake for the city of Los Angeles or even the same U.S. government are relying on on-the-cloud services from Google, as it believes that it is prepared to offer a reliable service … even in the email.

It even has coined a term to refer to these incidents: GFail. Bad for the credibility of Google: losing the trust of its users is the worst that can happen to a technology company

Say “Google” that seems synonymous with “success.” However, should the giant in Mountain View also offers some flagship projects, which Google justifies its policy of researching and developing all kinds of initiatives.

However, we must not forget that they are projects that reached the public, so it took months of testing and development. The products that succeed on Google are those who find the balance between revenue generation and utility for users. Therefore, in their unsuccessful projects, one of these elements should be misconceived.

EWeek magazine found in a compilation with the ten Google Audio Failures:

1. Lively: A three-dimensional universe in which users could create an avatar to interact with other avatars. Not find a good host or between companies or between individuals, so Google it closed earlier this year.
2. SearchMash: an application that allowed reorder search results, among other functions. The problem is that Google placed in a separate web, without publicity. He closed the service in autumn 2008, replacing it SearchWijki, where you can also modify the search results.
3. Google Notebook: a kind of notebook that allowed to collect and organize information in a document accessible via the Internet. Rather than suppress it, Google has abandoned this project, betting tools similar but more advanced operations such as Docs, Sites and Tasks.
4. Google Video: a service that became meaningless when buying YouTube, but still operating. Google considering giving other uses, including providing streaming movies.
5. Mashup Editor: A tool has also been deprecated by another project of the house, App Engine. However, there is much competition in the sector of the platforms for building applications, for example, Amazon Web Services, or those offered by Salesforce.com.
6. Google Catalogs: who would ever seek advertisements in the Web? Especially when Google has in hand a much more important to scan books from around the world.
7. Dodgeball: A mobile social network that Google acquired in May 2005, which used the position of the user to locate and send messages to nearby friends. Along with Orkut and Zingku, shows that social networks are not Google’s forte.
8. Google Print Ads: draft print advertisements in newspapers in paper sank like a fish out of water.
9. Google Radio Ads: More of the same: Google overestimated their technological capabilities outside their usual ecosystem (Internet) or encountered disbelief or rejection of traditional media.
10. Shared Staff-an attempt to enter the field of social bookmarking, Delicious style. The low acceptance has come to incorporate the concept to the Google Reader.