You just made the list, buddy. Also, I don’t like no one touching my stuff. So just keep your meat-hooks off. If I catch any of you guys in my stuff, I’ll kill you
OK, so someone touched my stuff. Well, not my real stuff – my digital stuff. Specifically, somewhere between my web host, Spry, and the Gmail client I use to access the mail on the Spry server, something changed. Yes, I’m aware that there have been big problems with Gmail recently, although I must admit that I have not had any trouble with one account while another one is inaccessible.
Nope, all was working quite well until late last week. For months, Gmail would ping Spry every so often, emails sent to my business mail would pop up and I’d be…umm…in business! Then, nada. I became Mr. Unpopular. In fact, in looking at it, it was around 7:30 Thursday evening when the mail stopped flowing. When I had received nothing via Gmail on Friday, I used the Spry client (not as nice as Gmail) to check mail. Hey! Turned out I was the belle of the ball and now officially negligent in responding to the folks who had written.
So fess up. Someone changed something and now it’s broken. As businesspeople, it’s important to constantly improve the product, but when something goes wrong, we need to let the people who rely on us know that we screwed up. Did the folks at Spry do something to change how POP access happens? Don’t know. Twitter had way more to say about Google’s problem than did Google (such irony) and that’s wrong.
The problem happened late afternoon Eastern Time and so caused an explosion in the US blogosphere. Google said it didn’t usually respond publicly to such problems, but decided to because: “We heard loud and clear today how much people care about their Gmail accounts.”
Doesn’t respond publicly? The openness of the web should inspire the same open, candid atittude among those who derive their living from it.
I’ve been in a lot of meetings where someone has floated an outrageous hypothesis to the room and asked someone to respond. For example, “if we gave you $3 million more next year, what would the additional revenues be in 5 years?” OK, not outrageous, but also not something one should be answering off the top of one’s head. Or maybe “what will your biggest competitor be doing in six months?”. In today’s evolving environment, many folks aren’t exactly sure what they’ll be doing themselves, so why try to answer about a competitor?
Consult Keith 