Google’s David Girouard on the company’s cloud computing ‘perception problem’

June 9, 2009 | Anthony Ha | Comments | |

During today’s press event highlighting new features for Google Apps (the company’s online productivity tools), Google Enterprise President David Girouard spoke about common concerns leveled against applications in the Internet cloud — in other words, running software on Google’s infrastructure rather than your own. There are plenty of potential customers who are still concerned about security and reliability, but those worries are more an matter of perception than reality, Girouard said — and, surprisingly, he pointed a finger at the journalists in the room.

There’s a bit of a double standard at work, he argued. When most technical systems have a minor outage, the press doesn’t say anything. But if Google has “a service disruption of any size, it gets picked up.”

“It is a perception problem,” Girouard said. “That’s our problem to fix.”

And Google has been taking steps in that direction, he added. It unveiled an Apps Status Dashboard so customers can see whether different services are up and running. Girouard also said Google has started to “really do better about handling enterprise users.” Those large companies tend to have the most concerns about using web tools, and they need to be certain that nothing will go wrong, so Google makes sure enterprises know their issues are being addressed “in a preferential way.”

As someone who has been guilty of “Holy crap — Gmail is down!“-style posts myself, I think there’s some fairness to the criticism and to the idea that the press’ occasional Google-induced frenzies have less to do with greater unreliability on the search giant’s part, and more to do with general cloud computing fears.

Not that those fears are completely baseless. For one thing, when a substantial number of Google services have problems, even if only briefly, it can be a big deal for the entire Internet.

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About the Author, Anthony Ha

Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.

  • Leaving aside the obvious fact that Google services outage has a much bigger impact than in-house outages (which are not very often operated by real SLAs -- by the way I don't think I've seen a Google SLA so far, but I might have missed it), I'd like to point out that there were quite a few cases when their Apps Status Dashboard was malfunctioning. Secondly, most of their post outage clarifications are not offering any useful information (it's not about the details per se, but about showing transparency and trying to show that you care and that you'll try to avoid further issues: here is a comparison on Amazon, Microsoft and Google reactions http://themindstorms.blogspot.com/2009/04/diffe...).
  • The problem of Google is that Amazon (AWS) stole/snapped up their market.
    They are not the leader although they have been into B2B business since ever.
    Whereas Amazon is B2C business and changed over to B2B for the AWS (S3 and EC2).

    Microsoft has a strong foothold in the business of medium sized companies, thus likely to get that part of the business.
  • How could anyone think Google isn't reliable?