This happened overnight, millions of user were affected and it's been on HN for an hour... with only 1 comment prior to this one. I think that shows how much business Microsoft get from this community!
Edit: though interesting to note it was a DNS problem again. More hackery?
Such a major problem is likely to raise questions about the reliability of cloud computing versus local storage.
Is anyone surprised this happened? It doesn't actually raise any questions about the reliability. Those answers were known when it was built. The first rule of network programming: the network is unreliable. The real question is: why do we keep playing along, blissfully ignoring that?
Oh please: we don't play along blissfully ignoring that. Arguably the biggest contribution to information theory is Shannon's source coding theorem, and we haven't forgotten it.
For day-to-day work, the redundancy & reliability of something Google Docs is much greater than a client computer. RAID is expensive. Backplanes fail. Laptops fall. But now instead of waiting 2-4 hours for a reimage & file transfer, I can take a base image, go to docs.google.com, and be up and running in the time it takes to walk a laptop to my office. Or, if more pressing: in the time it takes to log in at my coworker's machine.
>For day-to-day work, the redundancy & reliability of something Google Docs is much greater than a client computer.
Of google docs, yes. Of always having a network connection to docs, no. Maybe its just the environments I've been in, but at every client, employer, or place I've visited, my devices were more reliable than the network connection. Hell, last year the level 3 uplink for most of my state was out for a day.
In both cases you need a working computer to edit a file, but only one of them also requires a network connection. The only advantages you have are that software deploys faster because you're using a 21-centurly terminal emulator and the file under work is stored on the network.
Just because we as developers haven't put the solutions to quick and easy deployment of software packages and file redundancy into the hands of users doesn't make the cloud a panacea. We have these tools for us already. If my desktop fails, my latest-version files were on its hard drive, the network drive and usb flash drive, all synced after every save. I can grab a laptop or my co-workers machine and in the time it takes me to plug in a flash drive or just hit up a lan repository I'll have the files as they were at time of failure. If the other computer doesn't have the software, if I could hit up google docs on the other machine, I can easily smack 1 command into the terminal and in 30 seconds be ready to roll (and that server could be local, too, not relying on internet uplink). I'm not against relying on the network at all, but doing so in a manner that doesn't demand an always-on connection to get work done.
A solution that relies on the availability of network OR local machine and can gracefully handle the fault of one or the other is orders of magnitude more reliable than a solution that relies on BOTH network and local machine.
That just means that if you already had Google Docs open, you'll be able to keep typing away and it'll commit the changes when it gets a network connection again. It doesn't mean you can access your Google Docs (i.e. open up Chrome and type "docs.google.com" and expect anything to happen) without a network connection.
I just turned off my Wi-Fi and typed "docs.google.com" into the address bar — Chrome says it can't find the site. So I, at least, can't. Based on the Google blog post about offline Google docs, it looks like it's a lot more complicated than that.
You have to turn it on. When online and in Docs, click on the gear thingy in the top-right. There should have been an intro/help pop-up when you logged in after they rolled out the feature, did for me.
Because the reality is that a computer without an Internet connection has no significant value for 99% of people.
Also, let's not forget that for most people, minor downtime is a nuisance, not a real problem. It's annoying when I can't reach a web service I rely on, but it rarely if ever costs me money. With businesses, this can be a different proposition, but even then the savings from going "to the cloud" may more than offset any downtime costs.
Nothing is 100% reliable. The question is is the frequency/type of downtime vs. cost is more efficient (cost effective) in the cloud than doing it yourself. For some, especially small non-tech shops the answer is yes.
Citing that article looks like you're grasping at straws trying to find something wrong with Google. It's from two years ago and clearly specifies in the opening that a small number of users were affected. Microsoft's services went out for everyone, and today.
If you're going to suggest Google has similar difficulties, you might be 100% right, but you should point to a more relevant, recent article. A Mail system going offline two years ago for a small number of users is very different.
The article also links to other outages. Partial outages are frequent enough that they don't make news anymore and Google has a dashboard interface that shows them here:
Docs has been down twice in the last two weeks during business hours. 9/7 it was down for about an hour, and 8/26 the Docs listing was down for about two hours (the listed time on the 26th is about an hour after we submitted the issue).
Google docs might have not gone down for everyone, but when we used it, twice we had instances where entire documents got nuked. Eventually two week old backups were restored, which was essentially useless for the type of documents they both were.
Google Docs was down for over an hour just two days ago when they were yapping about switching to the cloud to save energy and announcing offline apps.
the article you linked to was from 2 years ago. i guess you are saying microsoft is 2 years behind? google apps had 99.984% uptime last year. on pace for over 4 9's this year, including planned downtime. microsoft is the newbie here, and judging from their first few months, it is a long and winding road before they iron out the kinks in their cloud.
Where do you get that info from? Isn't it a little early to extrapolate long-term uptime stats for a new service like O365? Maybe you were referring to the cloud infrastructure only, and not the app layer?
Hotmail: gave it up years ago for GMail. Office 365 (online): tried it out but never really got into it because I like GDocs a lot more. It's terrible that Microsoft online services went down, but it's unfortunate that it takes bad news to remind me that those services even exist.
I have to admit I really like Office365's Excel implementation, it is superior to GDocs Spreadsheet but the package as a whole is still not there...
Employees can edit GDocs on their tablets, Android Phones or iPhones with native apps or in the browser. Off365 offers none of these in most cases, requiring either a Win7 phone or a full PC browser client.
But the biggest kicker for for us is the ability to simultaneously edit word processing documents. We use this as a white board functionality when working through proposals either separately or on a conference call. Collaborative editing is a very powerful thing and last I saw Off365 only supports it in Excel.
I'm not saying that Microsoft isn't putting out a good product, just that they are still way behind GDocs as far as ease of access and core group features that they really need to step it up if they hope to grab back the mind share for online office products.
That is probably because tablets only account for a fraction of usage. Besides Microsoft does not have a good tablet story yet. With upcoming Windows 8, hopefully they will get act together and improve touch based accessibility for these products.
I have a bad feeling that they won't improve with Windows 8. The issue at hand is that Microsoft believes Windows 8 should be everything to everyone all at once, and it simply can't. They need to realise that to "win" in the tablet space they need to leave their love child Windows behind and build something that was designed from the ground up for a small form factor tablet device.
have you seen the demos they shown so far? the metro view in tablet form can be all you ever see. the legacy desktop code doesnt even get loaded. it's similar to what apple did with mac osx and ios, except you have the option of loading either of them.
Does anyone have an opinion on the reliability of Microsoft’s hosted Exchange services (or alternatives)? My boss would love to move his email into the cloud, but we keep seeing stories like this…
Edit: though interesting to note it was a DNS problem again. More hackery?