All your eggs in one basket = bad
August 11, 2008
Scott and I had lunch with a couple of former CEOs from local tech companies (both sold for $100MM+ valuations). The conversation moved to IT and the discussion of hosting your own email server and using Gmail came up. Both former CEOs swore they would never use Microsoft Exchange again given the power and ease of use Google’s Gmail service offers. I love Google - I don’t use anything else for search. I love many of their applications, but I like having control of my own email. Recently we have considered moving some of our email to Gmail ($50/year per box), but for some reason we have resisted the idea.
Our conversation about Gmail was a little ironic given that an hour or so later Gmail went down. More than 100 million people (mainly in the US) were without email for half of the workday. Depending on your opinion of email this was either a VERY bad thing or a very good thing. Assuming, as many of our clients do, that email is an essential business tool and that you are dead in the water until access was restored; what was the cost of the outage today? Lets estimate the downtime at 120 minutes for 100,000,000 people. Now assume everyone using Gmail is paid minimum wage ($5.85/hr). The total cost of the outage would be $1.1 billion dollars. Of course I realize that most of us didn’t stop working while our email was down, we just moved to other tasks, but many of us earn quite a bit more than $5.85/hr.
Hosted email may be the way to go, but having everyone use the same email provider may turn out to be a ‘macro’ problem ~ what if Gmail went down for a day? two days? a week? What if Gmail gets even more popular? One billion dollars in downtime will look cheap…
