What is with the erratic outages lately? If Gmail turns out to have the same amounts of problems as blogger has, it is really going to hit Google's reputation. I couldn't access Gmail for over 30 minutes in just the past week. That puts Gmail's reliability around ~99.8%. This means I wouldn't want to use Gmail to communicate if I were the Navy or doing anything important, like pulling a major presentation that is worth 30% of my grade on Gmail for backup... oh wait, I just did that. Luckily I have a backup on flash drive.
Perhaps I am paranoid, but I see cracks everywhere on Google's services. Google spreadsheet being out competed by best of breed applications like EditGrid down the road. Lack of progress on natural language search and vertical search (although Google blog search is a good start). Blogger still remains behind the curve in terms of offering features that its competitors have for a long time. Now Gmail is having weird problems. Blogger and Gmail both have reliability issues. So instead of buying into Google when the stock price were at $440, I put my money into the S&P index.
Google really needs to refine its products now that they are mainstream, and focus on providing value added services for these products. It needs to do so in order to differentiate itself from all the upcoming startups, and must offer quality in order to survive.
