
Google 'frantic' about Personalized Home Page glitch - pg
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/042607-google-frantic-about-personalized-home.html
======
andreyf
"The problems highlight one of the risks of relying on hosted applications
providers, which offer to house software and its data for individuals and
organizations."

What's with the unncessary bashing "hosted application providers"? I think
it's safe to say that many more users would be affected by bugs and dead hard
drives had they been running this on their personal computers, had this been a
desktop application, like Frontpage.

~~~
aristus
It's a visibility thing. Millions of circuit breakers trip in homes every
year. Not news. Millions of homes go dark at once? News.

Hosted apps have a risk (coordinated failure) that desktop apps generally do
not. 100,000 hard drives don't all crash at once.

Also remember that it's in the interests of journalists to assume a tone of
authority, to write in a way that mimics reasoned analysis: "this is part of a
recent trend". It's a little gratuitous, but it's not unnecessary bashing.

------
gibsonf1
This is bad news for any company trying to build trust in web hosted
applications and data (such as mine). I hope they can fix it and restore the
data, otherwise a lot of trust in general will be lost. Wouldn't they at least
have data backups? (Does Amazon's S3 backup their data?)

------
aristus
This is the upshot of putting your software on the web. Word or Access bugs
b0rk user data retail. The same kind of glitch in a web app is magnified
because it happens wholesale: everyone is affected at once.

But I would class this with the Yahoo/Google DDoS blackouts and the eBay
scaling blackout circa 1999. Teething problems that will soon be forgotten
_if_ they are fixed correctly.

------
dawie
I guess they should allow you to export your settings and take your data with
you. That is a Web 2.0 rule after all.

------
imp
I could see a few more episodes like this forcing Google to focus more on
'reliability' which could decrease the amount of risks they take and increase
their cycle time for new products. Has to happen eventually.

