andy’s place…

…seriously complain about an outage of a free service?  Twice in the last month or so, I’ve heard repeated whining, bitching, and moaning about how people were inconvenienced or affected by the Gmail or Google Apps outages.  Inconvenience, ok, I can buy that.  It can suck to not have access to your email for a while, but if it is not your business email, it’s not that big of a deal most all of the time.

Now, for the real complaint:  People that base their business on a free product/service, and bitch when they can’t reach it.  Why?  Why?  Why?  Why is it that most of the people that say this allowed to write?  If you are basing your whole show, your livelihood on a free product/service with no SLA, no guarantees, no real support system, then I can’t feel bad for you at all when I see you in the unemployed line (ok, I don’t want anyone there, but you get my point).

Now, maybe I’m a little biased in that I work in a shop that has money… lots of it in comparison to many shops.  I hear $100,000 for a purchase and say “that’s cheap” on a fairly regular basis.  And yes, I expect some Linux/Open Source people to tell me that they do this “free” thing all the time, but that has a support system of sorts.  While I may disagree with the effectiveness of this approach, it’s still support.

Gmail/Skype, etc… and basing your show on this?  I’m glad you are… every time an outage occurs, it’s just that much easier to compete in the market, as you just eliminated yourself.