Google groups outage

Thu Oct 14 14:42:21 UTC 2010

My favorite is my Droid telling me I'm not driving on a road while on one of the biggest expressways in Chicago. Then, sometimes it decides to route me through Kansas to get somewhere less than a mile from my house. 

Joe Johnson
Chief Information Officer
Riverside Consulting Group, Ltd.
Innovative Technology Solutions
365 Addison Road
Riverside, Illinois 60546
Phone: 708.442.6033 x3456
Fax: 708.442.9722
joe at riversidecg.com
www.riversidecg.com

-----Original Message-----
From: JC Dill [mailto:jcdill.lists at gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, October 14, 2010 9:28 AM
Cc: nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Re: Google groups outage

Hank Nussbacher wrote:
>
> Google Groups is the most poor managed project in Google.  No one 
> really cares much about it inside Google (my view as an external 
> user).  Go try to find some of the older Usenet postings they imported
> years ago after they bought out Dejanews. You won't find much.   I've 
> reported bugs (search function, language search, etc.) over the past 3 
> years to them via their Groups forums and other means and basically 
> they all end up in dev/null.

This is true for many of Google's projects.  I believe it's an artifact of their "20%" policy.  People are given work assignments on projects that Google wants improvements on, and then in 20% of their time they can work on projects of their own choosing.  I believe that many (most?) of Google's abandoned projects were 20% projects, and their supporters did the first 90%[1] then got bored (lazy) and moved on to something
new(er) and more exciting.  I'm pretty sure Orkut and Google Groups were both 20% projects that have since been essentially abandoned.

And don't get me started on Android.  The mapping and navigation software on Android sucks so many different ways that I'm surprised that Google allowed it out into the real world, nevermind providing it on shipping products.  It's been this broken for over a year, so obviously there isn't anyone inside Google who cares to fix the obvious problems.  
Whoever it was that developed these aps to this 90% state, has moved on to some new(er) and more exciting 20% project.

jc

[1]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-ninety_rule