No Gmail!!!

Yesterday/today (depending on where you live) Gmail went down for some, probably most users. Those who were affected tried to log in but were given the deadly message of "Temporary Error (502)", whatever that means. Apparently it lasted for two hours, I never it experienced because I was in bed dreaming about football, my girlfriend, water chemistry, cycling, and sunshine. The cause of the outage was a temporary glitch in Google's contacts system which caused Gmail not to load properly. Google, like the good people they are, apologized via a blog post. I guess Google technology, like all technology, is not perfect, there will be outages, bugs, delays, and crashes. Some people are jumping on the bandwagon and claiming that instances like this display that cloud computing will never work and we should stick with traditional desktop software..blah blah blah blah blah. My response to this is, how much time is wasted by this traditional software freezing/crashing/bugging out? The answer is a lot. The real issue that the Gmail outage raises is Google's poor technical support, which is basically a user group. Google definitely needs to put some of its big money in this area, they're good for it.