Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Nimbophobia: Why you should fear the cloud - Google's performance problems

Another reason to fear the cloud.

Google Calendar is getting slower ... and slower ... and slowweeerrrr.

It's barely useable on the web. Fortunately the slowdown doesn't affect my iPhone Calendar. It syncs via Google's exchange services, so any delays occur in the background.

Now I have a lot more events and calendars than most people, so hardly anyone will share my experience. Even so, this is important. The air is getting bad and the canary is going down. You may be next.

Why is Google's Calendar performance tanking?

I'm guessing they've cut back on their infrastructure spend. A reasonable choice in current economic conditions. Problem is, when a cloud company does this everyone is affected. There's no way to opt out.

So if I were a profitable company, for example, I'd be sharing the same pain as Google and other less profitable companies.

The Cloud makes everyone equal. Too equal.

Fear the Cloud.

Update 9/24/09: Blogger has an undocumented 5000 post limit. Prior posts cannot be searched or edited. Google has no fix four months after copping to the bug. Fear the Cloud.

1 comment:

Carlos Martins said...

Not only Calender, but Gmail as well.
At least, I've been noticing some subtle but - maybe even worse - continuous performance degradation in the past weeks.

If Gmail/Calendar and the rest of Google's services start slowing down... That will surely force a *lot* of people to reconsider it.