Billion Dollar Business Idea: Email With 100% Uptime
Gmail outage points out a very obvious — perhaps extremely technically challenging, but would be wildly successful — business idea.
It’s simply shameful that basic crap still isn’t working right. Hasn’t it been, like, forty years since email was invented?
Web-based email with 100% uptime. Promise it. Charge for it (it would be worth paying for). And deliver.
Don’t waste time developing faddish social media features like sharing, chat, or any other needless garbage not critical to sending, reading, and receiving email. Despite all the buzz over Twitters, Facebook statuses, and FriendFeeds, email is still the social network with the largest number of users.
Just as Google once delivered simple search done better than Microsoft and Yahoo! ten years ago, a company presenting brain dead simple email with 100% uptime could turn the tables on Gmail.
In the meantime, I shall continue to use an “old school” email desktop client (Apple’s Mail) to download all my Gmail info on a daily basis. The cloud still isn’t reliable enough, and seeing how it took forty years to get here — I figure there’s still at least a decade to go.
Additional Reading: The Sleepy Geek, Lockergnome, Cloud Ave
I don’t agree, if you offer a service to many, many people it becomes harder to offer 100% uptime. The biggest problem for mail service provider is spam, more than 80% of all mail traffic is spam.
That’s why I think gmail is doing fine, it’s up to the user to create solutions to have fall-back resources
Typical, say it’s up to the user to make up for technology’s failings.
I’m sick of people making excuses for technology, and criticism forces
companies to make things better. If enough people complain and demand
better products, maybe we’ll get them.
Sure you’re right there is no excuse, but the spam is the reality.
A email company can’t stop the spam and people don’t like to pay for mega strong servers because of spammers.
I guess the solution would be to offer premium services in a premium data center by a premium company (how much should that cost?)
Why, what is wrong with downtime once in a blue moon. It is not possible to have 100% uptime. Stuff happens, unexpected stuff happens. > 99.9% uptime is more than acceptable. So just lay off. As long as humans are involved, we will mess it up. It’s an unfortunate reality.
Well… You got the traffic that you wanted. What I want to know is if you will be man enough to apologize?
If you decide not to apologize, then I look forward to reading a story about you in INC or Fortune about America’s newest billionaire who figured out how to develop 100% uptime email.
Google can’t charge for it because it’s not good enough.
Oh, I am so sorry. I truly apologize for just expecting a product to work. Do you forgive me my dear Devo? Please will you forgive me.
Wow, you have really opened my eyes. I guess I’ll just consider it par for the course when my XBOX gives me the red light of death.
For the first time in a decade, I bothered to follow the link from the gmail outtage on a computerworld write-up to see for myself that someone would put their real name to the drivel they had posted.
I’m not even going to go into the comic-book-guy scathing that (I hope) you know you deserve, because at least you brought some traffic to your site.
There is a reason 100% uptime isn’t offered as a service. There is a reason gmail, at this point in time, is free: (as someone else pointed out) google isn’t going to charge for something it cannot reliably deliver.
If you knew what had happened, if you knew what you were talking about, the issue wasn’t with “e-mail” it was with the delivery mechanism, and their lack of appreciation of user load on their routers. A shortsightedness which they are culpable, but big enough to admit their error. It had nothing to do with “40 year old email”
So, Kudos on getting some traffic on your site. Maybe less so for puking out your ignorance on the matter.
Dave Connelly
dgconnelly@gmail.com
100% up time is currently thought to be impossible. That’s why it’s a billion dollar idea.
You act like I’m the only one annoyed at Google for this problem. So do you just sit and smile at everything around you, and only expect higher standards from the things you’re talented at? What happens when there’s a toenail clipping in your hamburger? Decide to go to chef’s school before filing a complaint?
I enjoy the blog community and I find useful information constantly trough these channels, but sometimes not researching really leads to misinformation. Its not a simple on/off switch to make something have 100 percent uptime. In fact, even paying a premium(which are often huge for companies. Ask people whose have worked for EDS or IBM Tivoli) the best they can do is 99.99% Uptime.
I used to work in email metrics and these thought processes are exactly why modern IT is often so mismanaged. You often get a CIO with no tech experience spouting off “well it should be up 100 percent of the time!” when really it is cost wise almost impossible. Think about the resources needed to ensure 100 percent uptime. They would need to build not one but MULTIPLE Server Farms in different locations(also on different electronic grids). You’d also have to have the email services route to these locations on completely separate channels. Now after google spends millions and possibly billions of dollars for this service then they would have to find the customers for it(Good Luck). And you know what after all of this you still probably won’t have 100 percent uptime.
I’m not saying email can’t improve, it can and it needs to. Seriously though, its free, its pretty reliable, and you’re not going to do better so find alternate resources when its down.
At least one comment not raking me over the coals.
Here’s the deal — this post is a rant. I didn’t put much thought into it. I wrote it when I was annoyed due to the Gmail outage. Yes, I understand 100% uptime is technically impossible and probably too much to ask for. And I realize it would take a technological breakthrough, which is why I mentioned it was a “billion dollar idea.”
But consider this post the viewpoint of the end user. We flip a switch and just expect things to work. Cable TV, electricity, water, Internet, the daily mail, you name it. And we get annoyed when it doesn’t. Voicing one’s opinion should not be discouraged.
And hey, obviously I set myself up for the entire Internet to call me a moron, so have at it.
Your problem was that you were quoted on ComputerWorld and your rant was passed for something authoritative. I’m glad you’re starting to recognize how ridiculous your post was because it absolutely was. Saying you’re mad at gmail so you’re going to use it through your mail app is ludicrous.
I’ve been using gmail for personal and professional email since they first sent me a beta invite (5 years ago) and this is the first time I’ve ever had problems. I am extremely satisfied with gmail and you should be too.
It was the web interface that was having problems. And using a desktop email client means I have all the emails stored locally. After this experience I’m just saying it’s worth it to me to pull all the emails down.
@Dan — That the rant was “passed for something authoritative” isn’t the fault of the author of this blog. Blame ComputerWorld if they misrepresented or misappropriated Webomatica’s post.
The length and style of the blog post above make it clear that it’s just a short, off-the-cuff rant and nothing more.
That others want to read more or make more out of it is what’s truly silly, not the post itself.
Thankfully we do have some “services” with 100% uptime (at least at present). The sun is one that I can think of. Yeah, yeah snarky commenters, I realize the earth’s rotation might cause some relative downtime depending on how you’re measuring things
Many boastful, young-adult males might also claim 100% uptime for their libidos…
It was the routers behind the GMail servers in general that were having problems. The reason that people with POP/IMAP access were occasionally still able to access their mail directly was that they take less load to retrieve data than a web interface, and so they were spottily reliable, while the web interface was mostly down.
For the record, GMail already makes an offline availability for their web interface. It’s in the Labs feature; you just install Google Gears.
I agree with the OP.…as an email admin myself, we should strive for higher than 99.9%.
Is it hard? Yeah! Is it possible? Definitely.
Businesses with smaller budgets than Google are running 99.99% a year.
Mistakes do happen, yes, but you can’t market yourself as an enterprise business solution and then expect everyone will be fine with 2hrs downtime in the middle of the business day.
As an e-mail administrator, then, you should understand that smaller.…is easier. How hard is it to manage an Exchange or POP server with ten users? Easy. At most, two synchronized servers can manage the maximum load with high reliability. Your net traffic per node will never exceed ten logins at once. At the world-wide enterprise level, with hundreds of millions of logins a day, it becomes a BIT harder, in case you didn’t know.
Three nines (99.9% uptime) is remarkably easy to guarantee for ten users. For ten million, world-wide, the requirements and the costs and the risks go up so far that you probably don’t even have the technical know-how to calculate them; I certainly don’t.
As far as their downtimes go, look up the other big players. In 2008, Yahoo had a multi-stage outage that affected hundreds of thousands of users for *four days*. Hotmail had trouble in November 2006 on and off for several days. They don’t offer the same reliability that Google does, which is good because they obviously can’t meet it either. I’m not saying that Google didn’t fail at what they did, which they most certainly did fail, I’m just saying that at their scale, the issues become a bit harder.