I Depend on Google More Than I Care to. Exactly What am I Supposed To Do Now?

Of course there’s nothing 100% stable and reliable in the online world as so many services tend to experience downtimes that prevent their users from doing what they want or need to. This is particularly true for smaller and newer services, especially those wearing the “beta” tag near their logos. But in this world that’s far from stable, there are certain things that are believed to be almost absolutely stable and reliable – and Google is one of them.

With so many good products and services offered by Google for free, it is no wonder that the internet giant has accumulated a huge army of fans and simply loyal users who will defend Google everywhere and pronounce their unending love to the search giant and all the tools it provides us with. And while this is obviously good for Google, there’s a certain – and a very significant – downside to it: we are all very vulnerable to Google’s faults and when they happen (no matter how rarely), we are all hurt more than we could ever realize.

As many of you already know, on Tuesday Gmail experienced a 100-minute downtime and the situation helped the team figure out the reason for the problem and now they are told to be working on the solution in order to prevent such things in the future. During the downtime I was asleep at home in Russia and did not even notice it due to the time difference so I myself was no affected. But yesterday before I decided to go to sleep I decided to check my inbox one last time – only to find out Gmail was unreachable. My husband complained that he could not even access Google.com which must sound like being unable to go online for many internet users. I expected a few important things to land in my inbox and was a little disappointed but decided to go to bed instead of waiting for Google to fix the problem for Russia.

This morning I have realized that was a wise decision as I woke up to the same situation where I could not reach Gmail. And not only Gmail – Google search was not available either and I’ve seen people on Twitter mentioning that Google Reader was down as well. My Twitter stream was full of complaints from my Russian friends who got to their offices only to find out they could do nothing related to their email because they relied on Gmail.

So while the problem was resolved in the US, something else effected Russia and we spent hours without Gmail: I’m not sure about the whole night but I only managed to get to my inbox by lunch time. And the only thought that I had at the moment was what should I do if the service is never back up or if something is lost in the process of fixing the problem and this something will be my very own inbox?

In fact, there have been a few quite pleasant discoveries today for me. For example, I have made a search on Yahoo and found out that it was not really bad and probably deserved using it – at least when Google was out of service. Also I have found out that checking Gmail every few minutes was really a huge timewaster – I could really be satisfied with only checking it once every hour or so. I mean, this is when I remembered to go and check if Gmail is finally back so this is probably perfectly enough instead of dropping by every few minutes.

But all in all, despite of the pleasant surprises I realized that the entire situation is worse than I could ever think about it. Of course no one will die because of being left out of one’s Gmail account but at least in my case the consequences could be huge. At that I am probably in a better situation than many of us because I have a habit of downloading all the emails to my desktop client and at least I can be safe I will not lose anything important.

But what if Gmail is actually gone? While I have almost all my business contacts in my corporate account and all the emails go there, all my personal activities and also some of my freelance consulting and translation activities are connected to my Gmail account and I will have to figure out how to move them from there. Besides, I use Gmail for online banking (so I can’t even get a notification of a new payment – if any – when Gmail is down) and also for some online payment services as well. These are particularly vulnerable and moving them elsewhere could be very painful. And of course there could be numerous things that I don’t even remember now but that are still there. And this makes me question the entire issue of our reliance on Google for so many things that we do online.

Last time I’ve been talking to my husband about the future of the internet (yes, I know it’s strange that spouses choose such topics for their lazy weekend chats), he insisted that in 10 years I will not recognize the internet at all and there will be virtually no software industry as we now know it – because absolutely everything will be in the cloud. I tend to be less enthusiastic myself when it comes to such revolutionary changes so I tried to persuade him that at the very least corporate customers will hardly want to move entirely to the cloud.

At that I would not dare to actually predict anything for a period as long as 10 years because ten years is like a whole life in the online world and everything could be entirely different. And chances are cloud computing technologies will evolve to the state where they are almost absolutely reliable and there will be virtually no downtime issues. But Google is supposed to be absolutely reliable as well, right ?