
If You Wanna Be A Phone Company, You Can’t Go Dead - jmorin007
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/13/if-you-wanna-be-a-phone-company-you-cant-go-dead/
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mechanical_fish
Here's a prime example of why I'm going to wait and see whether Google takes
its customers seriously before lavishing significant amounts of time and
attention on building a Google App that's completely hostage to their
infrastructure.

Half a day of downtime. No explanation on the blog. Nothing you can do but
wait and hope. I mean, my $7.95 web host didn't always have great customer
service, but I had the option to _leave_ , with less than a day of work.

Yeah, I realize that GrandCentral is an acquisition. Maybe their
infrastructure isn't up to the "Google standard" -- they wrote it in PHP, or
something. Maybe they've been Dodgeballed. Maybe Google Apps will be run by a
better manager from a different division with a much bigger customer service
budget. Maybe. But I'm sure that Google has more incentive to keep
GrandCentral up -- or at least answer questions about it -- than they would
have for my lousy Google App.

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rufo
What almost concerns me more is the fact that GrandCentral has barely been
updated since Google acquired them.

I took it as a vote of confidence that they'd be around for a while when
Google bought them, but I've been starting to wonder lately if they've been
Dodgeballed...

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angstrom
If you look at google acquisitions they usually integrate the ones that deal
with Adsense pretty quickly. The mobile acquisitions really have yet to pan
out. I wouldn't be surprised if this is more or less the story with GC. Google
is desperately trying to become a mobile player, but it's unfamiliar territory
and probably a money loser at the moment. It's like they're acquiring these
companies with shotgun style without really planning out their future
integration.

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martin
I use GrandCentral as the phone equivalent of a throwaway email address --
it's great as a number to give out to people who you don't want to give your
actual phone number. But I wouldn't trust it for anything more -- today isn't
the first time I've had issues with it.

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pius
Shoulda used Erlang! :P

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yariv
Maybe a better title would have been "If you want to be a phone company, you
can't go dead without being restarted by your supervisor" ;)

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dcurtis
For once, I agree with Arrington's linkbait-worthy tone.

Grandcentral is kind of more important of a service than others, and downtime
is unacceptable.

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sant0sk1
GrandCentral's CTO: "I knew DreamHost's rates were too good to be true..." :P

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redorb
"failure is not an option" its a fact of life. Things happen, it sucks but its
how lessons are learned

