• E-mail this page
• |  Print this page
• | 
• | 
• | 

Google Apps Needs To Grow Up

If Google Apps wants to play in the big leagues with its desktop software service, it needs to grow up. Vague details about a blip in service for Gmail isn't going to cut it in the corporate world, even if Gmail was acting up for less than an hour on Wednesday.

Yes, I know, you love getting your Gmail on your BlackBerry. It's slick and it's fast. But your CIO or IT manager isn't going to make it a standard for your company if Google doesn't bend over backwards to convince the people making the decisions that its software service is trustworthy, reliable, responsive and communicative.

Consider that Google will not publicly disclose the reason for the blip. Why not? Don't paying customers have a right to know? As my colleague David Berlind (an avid Gmail user and former IT exec before leaping over to journalism many years ago) pointed out to me, why was notification to Google Apps administrators limited to the Gapps admin panel? "That's the last place anyone would look since it is not commonly used as a means for messaging Gapps administrators," David said. More logical places include Google's Gmail blog or the "settings" area of Gmail. But if you went to the settings area during the service blip, the entire IMAP section had disappeared. That freaked out some people. "It had me worried that they abandoned IMAP altogether," wrote one or our readers.

Why was there no e-mail notification sent out to Google admins? What about this idea; an RSS feed for service-disruption alerts? Or a Web site like Salesforce's trustsalesforce.com that lets people track system performance? While the latter doesn't help get things up faster, it indicates a software service company is confident enough of its uptime to open the kimono, and it provides alerts on such things as planned maintenance. Companies want to see what's inside Google's kimono before they do something radical, like dump their traditional desktop software to undertake the implementation and training that would go with a Google Apps adoption.

And what about the integration of Salesforce and Google Apps? What happens if Gmail goes down, but e-mails are part of some critical business process involving customer contacts inside a Salesforce app? Will IT execs be satisfied with a posting in the admin panel?

One of our Google contacts said the company is running a post-mortem and is "evaluating its communications." That's a wonderful idea. Because if Google wants to play in the big leagues of "business productivity apps," as the corporate drones like to call it, it has to act like it. Otherwise, it's primarily an advertising company with a brilliant technology-driven business model, with a promising yet immature desktop software service on the side.

« MindTouch Puts The Enterprise In 2.0 | Main | Dedupe's Big Week »