When Gmail first went down, a flurry of users in all timezones started to spread the alert on Twitter and other social media. Within minutes the Gmail team had been alerted and had in hands detailed reports on the scale of the outage. It also had to deal with a public situation, ie solving the issue as quickly as possible to avoid a tainted reputation.

The main reason why some businesses avoid Gmail is the relative uncertainty of what happens in case of an outage: how to communicate with the Google giant and how to make them fix the mess. We now know that the ecosystem formed by the SMBs, Google and real-time and public tools like Twitter behave much like a distributed helpdesk mediating the flow of communication between the different parties.

Global and hyperefficient helpdesk now combined with Gmail ? The structural advantages of large companies over SMB are shrinking by the day…