Wherefore art thou Gmail? When the free web apps we love, simply go away.

We at MindBites are grateful Google App users, and like millions of other gmail and google app users, were without email for a fair amount of time yesterday. If you haven’t done it lately, at a random point during your day, while at your desk and without warning, take your email down for an hour or so. It is surprisingly debilitating. Then again, maybe it’s not that surprising. Email has become the backbone of communication for most people and organizations these days, and that is especially true for us as a distributed digital group.

So if email is so crucial to our operation, and web apps such as gmail or google apps have a risk of going down, why do we use them choose to rely on them?

Several reasons, namely they are:
1. Well designed and simple to use. Gmail is a well designed product and very easy to start using. Google Apps add a fairly seamless extension into a calendar, chat and other group tools. Paradoxically, good design has become sort of a hallmark of good web applications since the development constraints of having to load your interface as delivered through a browser connection has forced web app developers to be smart about what they include or don’t include. I believe that we will start to see more and more of the design innovations developed for web applications migrate to the desktop.

2. Accessible from any browser. While remote web access has obviously always been an inherent selling point for web email clients, gmail and google apps have taken this a step or two forward by incorporating additional productivity tools, namely calendar and chat. The result is that is has become virtually seamless to shut your laptop, drive across town to a coffee shop and open up to continue working. Also, by becoming a de facto infinite hard drive in the sky for most users, it gives you remote access to many files that may or may not be on your desktop machine.

3. Free. The price is definitely right. I do not believe that Google is making any money off of these applications however, nor will they ever. I do the ‘back of the envelope’ math of how many times I have ever clicked on an add in one of these free apps (once? maybe?), and compare it to strictly my storage and bandwidth costs and it is absolutely a fact that Google is losing money off of me. But, hey as long as they will offer it for free, we will happily partake with everyone else.

4. Easy to set up and grow incrementally. The beauty of well designed web applications is that they are incredibly easy to start using and the friction of increasing usage is next to nothing, making it a downhill ride to increasingly utilize it. This characteristic, by the way, is what has enabled the “Freemium” business model, such as a popular one with web applications.

5. Constantly evolving. New updates are rolled out, features improve and UI’s evolve. No upgrades, no questions, no decisions to be made.

So, what’s the downside?

1. Two major points of potential total system failure. If your web access goes down, or the central app goes down, you lose 100% of your functionality. You cannot access, read, write, reply or do anything with your email for the entire time that the access is down. This is the fundamental risk of web applications, and an unnecessary one in my opinion. Many of the tasks we have given to the central operation in web apps, could just as easily be performed on the desktop, and thus mitigating the damages of a commonly expected type of system failure - web access or the central processing go down. In our collective excitement that high-speed bandwidth penetration and wireless access have made large scale total web apps feasible, I think we have let the pendulum swing too far.

2. A complete lack of control and recourse. In reality, I would say that it is a perceived lack of control and more limited recourse than other options. I say limited recourse because if you paid for a desktop email package, even if you have a path of immediate recourse, which is to call and yell at somebody in customer service or tech supporter, the sad reality is that you really don’t have any “real” recourse. So in this case, the fact that you have no real recourse is actually not that different in reality. What is different is your sense of control. When your gmail goes down, there is absolutely nothing you can do. We’ve all had the situation of either sitting for 45 minutes stuck in traffic or spending 45 minutes taking alternate routes. Yes, it’s the same 45 minutes, but I think most people would trade the perceived control of taking the back roads vs. the maddening lack of control of sitting in traffic.

3. The lack of a profit incentive, mixes up priorities a bit in my opinion. What do I mean? Well, now that I have unlimited storage, I don’t even bother to delete emails or attachments. I simply treat my email as a stream of information with eternal persistence. Is that beneficial? A little I guess, but honestly I’d probably be better off if I were forced to keep it organized a little. But I’m not, so I don’t. I certainly wouldn’t behave this way if my cost were more closely aligned with Google’s cost. But, would I trade some of that cost for increased reliability, and an easier offline option? Absolutely.

So am I going to leave Gmail and Google Apps?
No. At least not right now. In the grand scheme of things, all software products, and all machines, fail at some point. This was a minor hiccup for a great application that, all things considered, has shown a tremendous amount of reliability, and been an incredible value for our startup. We will continue to use Google Apps, and support them. But, this outage will make me take a hard look at offline email clients, and I’ll be keeping my eye out for any more reliable options, even with the prospect of paying something (gasp).

I have a feeling we won’t be the only ones.

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