Google helped to disprove a popular urban legend, “that gmail is more reliable than other email hosting services.”

Tens if not hundreds of thousands of Gmail users this week experienced a severe service disruption. People were not able to retrieve their e-mail and cases some were not able to send e-mail and many even lost e-mail altogether.

This serves to disprove that popular urban legend that I’ve mentioned before because many people over the years has started to think that if Google hosts their e-mail, that’s about as reliable as things can get. After all Google spends billions on servers and maintenance tech support and everything else.

The fall is he in this hypotheses though lies in the fact that Google is notably terrible at customer service. They provide many free services that are excellent services and designed and built such that they will not require a great deal of maintenance, and Google lives up to that goal by not providing hardly any maintenance in the form of customer support.

So the next time you hear a Web 2.0 type of person talking about how much better Google Gmail is compared to other he now serves as the crash all the time, just remind them that Google Gmail is really no better than anybody else.  They can go whistle that tune of theirs at a set of wind chimes the next time Gmail crashes for a few days and Google officially describes it as a ‘Screwup’.