ON NEW GOOGLE INFRASTRUCTURE PROBLEMS MIRRORING MICROSOFT WOES OF OLD

"ASK FOR IT, YOU GOT IT"

"GOOGLE:  START ACTING LIKE A REAL BUSINESS, OR YOU'RE DOOMED"

...blared the lead headline on the Tech "A1" page on memeorandum.

Wow!  Talk about a "READ-ME NOW" blog post headline.  Turns out, it's the raging scream of Ethan Stock, a very frustrated CEO of a cool Web 2.0 startup, Zvents. 

They're all about the "peer production" of local event information, a new and exciting business area on the "Web 2.0" Internet (FYI, as an aside, folks like Eventful, et al are also laboring on this promising vein of Internet Gold, along with the Web 1.0 grand-daddy in the space, Evite).

Anyhow, Ethan was tremendously upset at not being able to access his company's web analytics account at Google, which recently acquired his vendor Urchin, and renamed the thing Google Analytics (please see my two posts yesterday for background, if needed, here and here). 

His heartfelt and dramatic "you're doomed" headline came from his frustration of not being able to run his business.  (unrelatedly, his company had recently been the topic of discussion on supporting Yahoo! vs. Google mapping APIs --via Scoble).

And I could empathize, given my recent frustrations with accessing this site's blogging provider, Typepad, in recent weeks as they've gone through a "must expand infrastructure rapidly to meet tremendous user growth phase". 

And they've dealt with it proactively, to the extent of offering subscription rebates to customers for the outages in service.

But the two events made me take a step back.  There's a negative underbelly to the shifting trend from standalone desktop computing to Internet-based computing, that may be under-appreciated.

For three decades, PC users everywhere have cursed (mostly Microsoft) in almost every language on the planet as their PC crashed at a critical moment and they had to reboot, possibly losing unsaved worked, and countless time in productivity.

And now we're shifting to cursing Google and other portals, as increasing amounts of our "must-do" daily activity, personal and professional resides on the net.

The old joke of "ask not what you wish for" may be upon us. 

For a decade, many pundits (including yours truly), have been yearning for a world where our computing world is in the "network cloud" rather than attached to a single machine in a single location.

And we're getting there fast, Microsoft memos notwithstanding, courtesy of Google, Yahoo!, GYMAAAE and many, many others.

But there's a profound trade-off we're making here as mainstream users. Believe it or not, there may come a time when we miss the "good old days" of the infamous "blue screen of death" that could generally be solved by a "Control-Alt-Delete" reboot and five minutes away getting some coffee.

In the "web services" world we're racing towards, our down-time is defined by how long as it takes our provider to "reboot" and fix their service at the network level, which could take hours, if not days and weeks.

It's a big deal, and needs to be addressed by all the providers.  And users need to be mindful of this as they re-order their personal and professional computing lives.

In recent posts, I talked about the increasing infrastructure challenges for web businesses, and the problems faced by users personal and professional, as they deal with a Web 2.0 world. 

It may be time that web businesses also figured out ways to deliver "minimal" levels of service to their users in times of infrastructure problems, kind of like phone service that works even when the power goes out.

Other services like the off-line world have had to deal with this problems all through the modern era.  Think of the expense and frustration when power, phone, water, gas, cellphone and road services go down at times of natural disasters.

Now those risks are migrating over to the Internet, not in terms of one's internet access going down, but critical, everyday applications going down.

There's unfortunately going to be lots more "YOU ARE DOOMED" curses echoing across Web 2.0 and beyond.

Comments

[Zoli Erdos]

Michael, although this is not the key point in your post, I just wanted to mention that I don't think zvents switched from Google to Yahoo. Ethan mentioned in his blog they will work with Yahoo, too, in fact he got Yahoo clarify/amend their API use policy, but at least for now you still get Google maps when using Zvents.

[Peter Caputa]

This isn't the point of your post either, but WhizSpark isn't about the peer production of event information. Click my blog URL to go to a post that clarifies what we do.

Or click here. (Assuming you allow html)

[Michael Parekh]

Zoli, thanks for the catch...have revised.
Also, Peter, thanks for the clarification on WhizSpark...have also revised.