There’s Something To be Said for Crashing En Masse

When he blogged for Advertising Age on Monday, I understood Simon Dumenco’s fear of a high-flying crash from Googling in the Clouds. Simon wondered what might happen if 10, 20 --or heck 75 --percent of, say, all U.S. small businesses were dependent on Google Apps and the Google went down for hours.

Sounds possible. Still, I'm thinking (selfishly, I know) it might be better to go down with all my friends, colleagues, and clients than go down alone.

I had a system failure -- my first in 25 years -- in January. I remember skulking off to Panera to disclose I'd had a hard drive crash and plead for patience. Amid the sympathetic grunts, I suspected some corporate colleagues were attributing the failure to my "little home office" or to my failure to back-up properly. I was backed-up, of course – in three places -- which didn't mitigate the complexities of rebuilding a Mac mail file during an upgrade from Tiger to Leopard .. but that's another story.

In less far-flung -- but every bit as debilitating -- disasters, system upgrades also can render software applications useless. It's no fun being disarmed all alone.

I’m not using Google apps. Maybe I never will. But this little Desktop Diva that I have to upgrade, back-up, clean-up, coddle, and tend to every single day is pretty high maintenance. She whines for the latest toys and gets nasty when I ask her to do too many things at once. Sometimes I’m not sure she won’t commit suicide. I'm thinking her Big Brother might be more stable ...

Maybe Google Clouds will burst every now and then. The rain could be refreshing, what with it happening to everybody at once. Kind of like a no-school Snow Day, yes?

-- scrubbed by Marketing Brillo