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Comment by silverbax88 | Hacker News Reader

I have a gmail account, but I don't use it. I would say the same for any business. No business with any sense is going to rely on Gmail for their internal business communications.

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No business with any sense is going to rely on Gmail for their internal business communications

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/customers/ says you are wrong.

And I don't think that's a bad thing - Facebook is a problem, not Google. Don't tar every company with the same brush.

Any companies on that list using Gmail as their primary email service are foolish. But I'm not sure why you think I was somehow equating Facebook with Google simply because I don't agree that everyone has Gmail and is using it.

I use google apps to host my email for my company, with all emails backed up to our server. Why is that foolish?

Ah, now here's a different thing: should a comet fall on Google's data centres, you still keep your data. I infer that you probably thought about privacy risks. I also suppose your company's email address isn't "@gmail.com". That would be foolish.

Despite the other comments, I completely agree with you.

It's just foolish to give up control of one of the most important communication resources your business has to a company with a notoriously poor customer service record.

http://www.formortals.com/gmail-is-not-a-business-tool-perio...

That's your prerogative, of course, but more and more businesses are outsourcing their internal email to an outside service. Sometimes that's the commercial version of Gmail and sometimes it's a competitor.

Regardless, that seems like a move toward central control rather than toward anything I'd describe as a distributed service.

I'd bring up that "outsourcing their internal email" is not the same thing as "using Gmail". But as to your point about centralization, companies (like Facebook) have tried for years to centralize data and it hasn't worked yet. Microsoft has tried it, IBM has tried it, and Google continues to try it.

I think the issue is that there is difference between allowing people to log into an account with Facebook and companies actually sharing their data with each other. There's also the reality that as companies die, merge or change course, the massive amounts of data they have often simply becomes unused.

Quite a few do. Why do you think this wouldn't make sense?

Have you ever suffered a Google outage? I don't mean the kind of system-wide failure that gets all Googleplex hands on deck. I mean the kind of random, individual catastrophe that comes with a crash-course in just how astonishingly unreachable the Googleplex really is.

Yes, I have first hand experience with this. Dealing with Google "support" taught me a harsh reality that Google simply isn't interested in support in the way that Fortune 500 companies need and expect.

It comes down to the not-so-subtle difference between "customer" and "user".

Reminds me of the joke about there being two kinds of people in the world; those who have lost data, and those who will.

The first is support - Google isn't in the business of keeping you in business.

The second is that you are turning over all of your internal communication, almost all of which should never leave the company, to a third party.

> The first is support - Google isn't in the business of keeping you in business.

I'm not sure I understand this. Why isn't Google in the business of making sure its paying customers stay in business?

> The second is that you are turning over all of your internal communication, almost all of which should never leave the company, to a third party.

How is this any different from storing source code on GitHub, or using Campfire to communicate?

How is this any different from storing source code on GitHub, or using Campfire to communicate?

A very reasonable argument is that you shouldn't be using those either. GitHub is fine for open source projects but if I were involved in writing proprietary code I'd probably not put it up there.

Out of interest, why not? Is it that you don't trust GitHub's security, or do you believe there's a chance GitHub might appropriate your source code?

Think conflict of interest. What if GitHub was bought be a competitor or other hostile entity? Now, can you guarantee they never will be?

You can't guarantee anything. It's all about trade-offs and managing risks. Putting your source code onto a private server doesn't guarantee that your source code is safe, and there are far more examples of source code being stolen from private servers than there are of companies appropriating source code from hosting companies like GitHub.

This is true. But would the story get out if it happened? And it's not limited to appropriation. There are stories about, say, Assembla, and the terms of code storage changing dramatically. You could also have a company where the security on transferring the code was inadequate. That's a concern you don't have as much if your servers are local (though you need VPN for remote coders).

It's also hard to talk percentages -- there are a lot more companies storing source code on private servers than using external hosting. So yes, more stories of that, but it's hard to talk percentage chance rather than absolute numbers.

Is the risk large enough to justify using a more expensive and less functional in-house system? To me, the risk of using a third-party host seems vastly outweighed by the benefits.

What's the alternative for a small company? Our ISP's mail servers?

Where does one draw the line?

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