Once again, Gmail users were locked out of their hosted online accounts for hours, prompting another round of angry service complaints to Google–and more questions about Google’s readiness to be a real player in the enterprise space.
While equipment breaks and outages are probably unavoidable, the real test of Google’s enterprise savvy is its response to such service disruptions. Constant communications, quick response and a fair degree of hand-holding is necessary, especially for paying customers. While a Google official posting status updates on the Apps forum wrote that the problem affected “a small subset” of Apps users, more than 500,000 businesses and universities with about 10 million active users currently use the free and fee-based versions of Google Apps. A small subset could actually be a fairly big number. And those users had little recourse during the outage than to sit tight and wait.
According to the complaints on the thread, some were waiting nearly two hours just for an update from Google. Not a good sign, especially as Google plans to bolster its Apps suite in an effort to become more attractive to the enterprise. Let’s hope it’s bolstering its customer service arm as well.
