In the 90’s I used to laugh at friends who all used Yahoo! as their personal email service. I did not understand how anyone could put up with the slow speeds of web-mail, and tried to convince them to install a decent email client, like Outlook, which is what most of them used in their corporate jobs.
Then things changed: Outlook grew into a bloated monster, it brought otherwise fairly speedy computers to a grinding halt and finding stuff in the archives of years of email became a gargantuan job. A new web-based email service came to rescue: Gmail was fast, well-organized, included productivity-boosters like labels and conversation-threading, and most importantly, you could not only search but also find old email in seconds! For this former Outlook-fan the switch was a no-brainer – in fact I ended up ditching almost all desktop software, moving online. (Gmail for mail and Zoho for most other tasks).
Life was good, I stayed productive and Gmail grew into a suite of productivity services by Google. Too bad it’s breaking down – again. I’ve been tweeting about it for a while:
Still a Gmail-fan but recent horrible slowdowns force me to look for alternatives.. at least as backup / failover – June 2010.
Gmail: Oops… the system encountered a problem (#717) – Retrying now… not a good way to start the day – few days ago.
Gmail: Oops… the system encountered a problem (#717) – Retrying now… not a good way to start the day – few days ago.
Today TechCrunch addresses the same problem: Hey Gmail, 1994 Called, It Wants Its Dial-Up Level Performance Back. Experiencing the same issues MG Siegler tried to get some explanation from Google, who responded that they were unaware of any performance issues. That’s really shocking, as I do recall Google stating half a year or more ago that they were aware of the root cause and that they would make amends soon to improve the performance of large accounts. But what’s really troubling is that it’s not at all a new problem. I described the exact same situation two years ago: Life After Outlook: Gmail. But is it Becoming Oopsmail?
Formerly rock-solid Gmail has been ill a lot lately. The “Oops…the system encountered a problem (#500) – Retrying in 1:30” error message has became a daily occurance… in fact several times a day.
I somewhat jokingly called “retry now” Gmail’s Penalty Button, when I noticed every time I hit it the wait counter increased by a minute…
Google actually fixed that error, and Gmail became usable … for a while. Today’s situation is very different. How different? Well, the error code is no longer #500, it is now #717 – or nothing, just “loading” and “still working forever”.
How bad is it? Bad enough to force me to switch to another tab, do something else and check back later. (Too bad I often forget what I wanted by the time I come back – I guess my brain needs an upgrade, too
). When someone calls or I am on chat, I act like a poor Customer Service agent: sorry, my system is sleepy today, I can’t pull up the information. That is hurting… a lot.
It is bad enough that I should seriously consider moving off Gmail, despite how painful migrating years of archives is. (Hey, I know, I wrote the guide to migrate to Gmail long before they offered migration services.) Ironically, both Yahoo Mail and Hotmail improved significantly, largely due to competitive pressure from Gmail. And Zoho Mail, which I’ve run in the background to sync with Gmail for years has become quite robust and feature-rich.
But here’s the problem: despite all this talk, I’m not moving…at least not yet. I’m in Google Prison, just like I used to be in Outlook Prison. The difference is that Google Prison is a happy place – I’m chained here by the growing ecosystem of Google services, including Apps, Google Voice, Android …etc. It’s hard to leave when your entire life is in Google. I’ve become assimilated. I need my data to stay in Google. And I need the Borg to improve.
