Oops! GrandCentral Goes Down on Sunday
When Google acquired GrandCentral for $50 million, the assumption was that it would bask in the bright lights and big resources of Google and not run into the pitfalls that smaller companies encounter on their own. This weekend, the service went down, and the only man who could do anything about it was stuck in the mountains without so much as a bar on his cell phone.
One thing about the phone company: it usually works. The only time I remember being in a long-term phone blackout was the great Northeast blackout in 2003. My phone didn’t work for about 24 hours because the New York City was completely shut down. I think that’s a pretty valid excuse.
Apparently, a power outage was the excuse of GrandCentral’s service interruption, which lasted several hours. Founder Craig Walker replied on the GrandCentral blog, “Unfortunately I’ve been up in the mountains with the family this weekend and had no cell/internet coverage so couldn’t respond earlier. I did want to let you know that we were able to restore the service by noon today and are working extremely diligently to make sure this won’t occur in the future.”
Google must not be putting much in the way of resources into GrandCentral if they are reliant on the co-founder–and him on– to clean up after an outage.
But GrandCentral is in its beta period (although isn’t Gmail also still beta?) and it’s free of charge. However, phone service is one thing that can’t experience lengthy outages.
GrandCentral itself is an excellent service in theory. It gives you a single phone number that you can keep for life and the response given by GrandCentral varies based on your relationship with the person that calls, and what you’re doing. If it’s a personal call during work time, it will go to your voice mail perhaps. If it’s a work call on the weekend, you can relay it as you wish.
It’s a great idea, but it remains to be seen if Google is going to take it seriously enough for people to want to use it.
Technorati Tags: grandcentral, google, craig walker
