March 1st, 2007

Google Apps’ Achilles’ Heel

by Scott Karp

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I was working on a spreadsheet in Google Docs & Spreadsheets last night when I got this error message:

google-spreadsheet-disconnected.jpg

This is like the infamous Micorosft blue screen of death — the end of trust.

Until Google Apps has seamless, ultra-user-friendly offline support, it’s simply not ready for prime time — and not to be trusted.

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Topics: Google

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  • > "loss of trust"
    I'd much rather lose a few edits and know my stuff is on a server of a huge company like Google (or Microsoft!) than lose a whole file - actually a whole hard drive - because I've either been unlucky enough to hit my own hard drive's "mean-time between failure", or, more likely, dropped my laptop... A warning message like this leading to a complete lack of trust seems like a huge over-reaction from a guy who probably backs up his hard-drive daily ;)
  • Peter,

    "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
    -- Arthur C. Clarke
  • Peter Kwangjun Suk
    Equivalent to the Blue Screen of Death? Only in the mind of someone to whom all computing is magic. They are very different things.

    You only think you might lose all of your data next time because this is all just indistinguishable from magic. More likely -- auto-save will continue to save most of your work, and if it ever did stop working, you'd get some sort of notification dialog.

    But until that happens, keep calm and stop displaying your ignorance.
  • I couldn't agree more, Scott. I had the same issue that Drew had with Gmail -- out of comission or ridiculously slow all day, messages coming in all out of order -- and have had them with Google Docs as well. I think Google has to offer caching like Zoho or some form of it, or they are just not going to get anyone taking their apps seriously.
  • I had a cold on Wednesday. Still do. I thought I'd be clever and upload my doc and xls to Google and work from home. But yesterday it was my turn to join the "subset of Gmail users" without Gmail. I could get to my word doc but not Gmail. No trust here.
  • Good point Scott - I can't even imagine even using Gmail as my primary email account because of the lack of offline access. Keep in mind, however, that Firefox is working on offline application support/caching - and, of course, a large number of Google employees work on Firefox.
  • Erin, I had the same experience, so it wasn't the loss of data so much as the loss of trust. Just because there wasn't a large data loss this time, doesn't mean that there won't be one next time.
  • Erin
    Luckily because of auto saving, each time this has happened and I've clicked "Discard Changes and Reload," my document has reappeared in pretty much the same version -- only one or two actions were not saved. Not terrible, but yes, not ready for prime time.
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