I’ve written a few posts about Google products lately (more to come probably) and I realized that I use a lot of them. In no particular order here are the ones I use (ones I’ve written about are linked):
- Google Search
- Gmail (Personal and work [VaTech switched over last year])
- Google Docs
- Google Calendar
- Google Drive
- Google Voice
- Youtube
- Google Maps
- Google Chrome
- Android
- Google+
- Chromebook/ChromeOS
- Chromecast
- Google Groups
- Picasa (on its way to total Google+ integration)
Google ReaderDEPRECATED, so sad. :( Feedly now has my business.
When I started typing this list, it grew quickly and to be honest, I was pretty surprised with how many there are. I use more than half of the products on the list multiple times a day (Search, Gmail, Docs, Android, etc) and everything else I use at least a few times a week. Crazy, right? I thought so.
The main thing that strikes me when looking at this list: across so many products, platforms, and devices, I have never experienced downtime that lasted more than 30 minutes (and to be honest that is being a bit liberal, it’s more like 10 minutes; I just can’t remember the last time one of them was down). This is quite incredible to say the least! Google is a beast in this area, they take having their services up seriously and deliver just that: services that have a ridiculous up-time record. Take a look at the app status page to get an idea of how often they run into issues and how long it takes them to get resolved. When they do have issues, they are solved almost immediately and they report on what the issue was that caused the outage. I love that they take the time to explain to the users what the problem was, how they fixed, and what they are doing to prevent the service outage in the future. The details aren’t too technical but just enough that I feel like they are being honest about what happened. Someone is taking the time to explain to the world that “Yes, we at Google screwed something up. We are sorry and are working so that it does not happen again.” I love this mentality and think other companies should take a page out of their book and do this more often.