At work, I wanted to use google sheets for our schedule because it just works: can have view only links, and it handles multiple editors at the same time gracefully. Got asked “well what if google goes down?”, so back to our problematic system of excel sheets it is :(

As much as GSheets is great software in theory, "just works" is something I'd never use to describe it. Google is the absolute worst when it comes to keeping stuff working outside of Gmail, Search and obviously Ads. They will silently drop functionality and randomly break things without any recourse.

Just a week or so ago, the IMPORTHTML/XML and related functions in GSheets just...stopped working. There are Reddit and Google Helpdesk threads about it so it's clearly a global issue. As far as I know, no fix has landed yet.

I had to spend a weekend writing a bunch of scripts to reimplement importing functionality so an international competition hosting more than 600 people from 28 countries wouldn't collapse on the spot. Everyone on the team, including me, was initially glad we were using GSheets as it made our work much easier - until it suddenly made it much, much harder.

That may have been a wise person! "What if Google takes us down" (rather than goes down itself) is a valid business risk to at least consider.

Google & co are doing their best to remove themselves from a rational person's critical path. They're too big, you're too small; they're full of AI and politics, you have no recourse.

if someone had told me that "full of AI" was going to be an insult one day, I would have said they were too cynical about the glorious AI future, but in hindsight perhaps you are right

I experienced the opposite when Google actually went down and all of our email, docs and information went away for the day. Then one day our Internet went down and then the company bought a Microwave internet link and an off site server.

> You will actually experience a lot less downtime by investing in your own wafer saw (or your own servers) rather than outsourcing (to a foundry or a cloud provider).

Analogy doesn't work; "in-sourcing" of previously-IaaS resources as a cost-cutting measure, is used almost exclusively for "base load" (vs. elastic load, which is the comparative advantage of IaaSes); and so your in-house servers are usually running pinned at 100%. So the hardware components will wear out just as fast, if not faster, than the IaaS's servers will; and when they do, your ops team won't have as many spare parts on hand as the IaaS does; nor the ability to live-migrate the enforced VM to another exactly-equivalent substrate host in the fleet (which was already warm) to avoid downtime altogether.

Also, apart from that, there are economies of scale in reliability. Your in-house backups are probably just a ZFS pool or a RAID5+1 array or something. They're certainly not hosted within a 17+-copies Dynamo-ish system, the way most IaaS object storage (incl. archival storage) is, because the costs of doing that in-house are ridiculous.

What do you think about external core dependencies? For example, people are starting to use Okta/Auth0 for the authentication core of their apps.

Obviously, this puts them at the mercy of the okta if anything goes wrong with IdM. But then again, people are very bad at doing auth.

> 17+-copies Dynamo-ish system

Are you implying that having more than 3 copies is somehow more reliable? Cause that sounds pretty insane.

Rarely using a tool risks it rusting/rotting/obsoleting on the shelf, and if it is expensive you are paying a lot of depreciation. You buy a chraler consumer version that breaks, or an expensive professional model that depreciates. The time share model makes sense.