My Love Hate Relationship with Google Docs, and by Extension Google

I have been a strong proponent of using Google Docs to create off-line storage of your important files.  No more.

What happened?  Simply put: it worked until it stopped.  I do not know if that is because  I reached 96% usage of the 1 GB of non Google Docs formatted files, or something else, but I found that it started to behave inconsistently.  Strange, strange things would happen.  For example: (1) a document would show in one view, but not another; (2) the number of documents in folders plus the number of documents not in folders were less than the total number of documents; (3) I would delete a document but it would reappear a few days later.  This opened doubts in my mind regarding if I would be able to recover my files when I needed them.  Doubt and critical file storage do not make good bedfellows.

The obvious solution was to see if buying more space would eliminate the problem.  But, you cannot do that.  You can buy more space for email by going pro, but that does not impact Google Docs – coming soon?  The next step was to reach out to customer service – oh, yes!  There is no customer service.  So, I went pro, found out via email over a day or so that they could not solve any of this and downgraded.   This might be a way for Google to run its business, but it was increasingly clear that it was not the right way for me to run mine.  I started to work out alternative solutions to Google Docs.  Fortunately, they have added a download feature recently so that I could extract my 1,000 or so documents.  The question now was where to transition to.

I spoke to some folk, researched on the web, made a few calls and decided to go with Box.net.  It is different, but has some good features that will help us share and run our business better.  It costs money, but also has customer service.  I also get the sense that the profit motive will encourage them to ensure that their service works and improves over time.

The key insight is that Google by giving products away for free does not have the same customer relationship as someone who sells their products.  As long as the area is of interest to Google (for their business needs) they will offer and enhance the service, but they are not offering the service for the sake of servicing customers with it.  They are offering it for other objectives, and ultimately that means that the service might need to be OK, but not great.  When you sell a service, for profit, you listen to your clients, you find out their needs and you meet them.  You work to ensure your customers are happy and you find ways to enhance the service so that you can up-sell features.  You worry when things do not work and you are scared about the competition.  I am not sure that this is the case for all the free products that Google offers.  It is free to use some of them, for some of the time, when they care.  If Google decides to end a service, well they can do so and lose no revenues!  Though customers might want a Google Voice desktop product, but if Google decides that this is inconsistent with its everything-in-the-cloud philosophy then it will not happen.  The profit motive is a powerful tool to align customer and service providers objectives – Google does not have that in may of its offerings.

So, do I love of hate Google Docs?  I am not sure.  I have replaced a lot of Google interaction with Box.net, but still love some of the sharing aspects of Google Docs.  Does this make me feel less positive about Google?  not yet as I rely on Gmail and it works great (until it doesn’t).