Faith in Google
by Duncan
July 5, 2005
Not strictly blogging related but none the less amusing and concerning at the same: my Gmail this morning:
“Server Error. Gmail is temporarily unavailable. Cross your fingers and try again in a few minutes. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.”
If “cross your fingers” is the best a multi-billion dollar company can deliver than god help us all.
You actually had to keep those fingers crossed for quite a few minutes; the outage started the previous evening – the longest I ever experienced.
Makes me wish they did what Flickr does, when they post outages / status messages on the flickrblog any time their system goes down …
Yeah, that was frustrating. For me it just prevented me from doing my nightly quick check for anything important in gmail. As for the language Google uses, that’s in line with the informal communication style they have. If you submit a tech support question re: Blogger the initial auto-response you get is in the same style. I actually quite like it.
If my own tech support were as quick on the fix as Google is with their free services I wouldn’t be as frustrated as I sometimes get. Let’s remember these services are free so I’m willing to cut them some slack.
–Chris
Yep, “try again in 30 seconds” has an optimistic jauntiness about it. My favourite though is Technorati’s error message which says the problem is a “zero sized reply”.
I rather like Google’s informal style. I know it’s probably a marketing ploy, but it makes me feel like they’re very people oriented, as opposed to say, Microsoft.
And, after all, Gmail IS still in BETA. I think a lot of people often forget that, considering how many people are now using it.