800 LB Gorilla Misses the Mark with Apology

Unless you have been under a rock, at the Beijing Olympics, or on a remote island vacation, you have probably heard about the Gmail outage at Google yesterday.

Last night Google updated its blog regarding the outage, and apologized for the incident. While I commend Google for the apology, it left much to be answered, and lacked in nearly all areas of communication.

I am not a PR expert, I am a simple person who expects companies to step up, take ownership and explain things to me--- from my perspective. Google had a grand opportunity, and squandered it with their less than appealing explanation. Here is my $.02 debrief.

Google has always claimed to be open- Where is the transparency?

• What really happened and why?
• Why was the communication not until ‘everything will be back to normal by the time you read this’?
• Why did I have to learn about this through Twitter and follow updates there rather than direct through Google?

Google built its search engine on being simple and clear- Where is that clarity?

• OK, so you fixed ‘it’. What is ‘it’?
• You are ‘updating internal systems and procedures accordingly’. What are those ‘systems and procedures’?

Google raves about its infrastructure and stability- Where is the restoration of that confidence:

• Where any explaination of a root cause analysis?
• What are the steps being taken to ensure that this a) does not repeat itself, and/or b) minimizes the chance of it happening again?

Google does not exist without their customer- Why is this from the Google perspective and not the customer?

• The ‘temporary outage’ seemed to last at least 1 hour, that is an eternity to users
• Why would you get on a blog and apologize and communicate and then go on to say, don’t expect to see that here again?

As my 5th grade teacher used to tell me, ‘A’ for effort, ‘C’ for performance. Too bad we do not get measured on effort.