With SaaS (Software as a Service), cloud-hosted applications, customers have complete dependence on service providers. Unlike with software packages, if the service changes something that customers depend on, there may be no way to go back. So, fundamental software changes are different from incremental updates. Google has done a good job in the last few years with adding features and fixing bugs in its Apps suite. But this means that the company doesn't have a lot of experience in managing a comprehensive revision with hundreds or thousands of changes. The new version of the Google Docs editor is a complete rewrite, offering new but unfinished collaborative features, startling interface changes, missing significant functionality from the old version-it should never have been released from beta.
"Who hasn't awakened a colleague from a deep sleep with a mistimed telephone query, wished for a quick in-person chat to resolve a sticky problem with a co-worker who's forever on the move, or didn't know where to find a critical file owned by someone half a world away?"
"CloudFail.net aggregates RSS feeds from leading cloud services providers to bring you a unified place to find information about outages and maintenance (pre-planned outages), as they happen.
Cloudfail.net does not monitor individual applications or servers running on the cloud, we simply follow the outage and maintenance feeds provided by the vendor. This information contained on this website is only as accurate as what the vendor discloses."
"Dropbox didn’t get where it is today by being a wrapper for rsync, Git, Unison or any of the other open source tools for file synchronization. If you want to replicate Dropbox’s suceess, there’s a few features that are mandatory."