While the api is a little funny, it's clearly very powerful. Anyone criticizing the move to work with Google API's at all should keep that in mind. But the nonexistent service and unreliability of the API are hard to overcome.

TBH, I don't really want it to be that I whine in a very public place and the bugs I personally need fixing get priority.

What I'd really like to see come out of this is a public facing bug tracker for the Drive SDK that people can vote on and priority be given to the most voted for/most critical issues as viewed by the developers.

I can throw one onto github, as long as you don't mind something unofficial.

[0] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13971272/is-there-a-way-t...

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13366254/is-it-possible-t...

[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15664523/cant-get-google-...

And three nines is still 45mn of downtime per month.

SLA's commonly agree to 99.9% (and I've dealt with some picky clients), though 99.99% would be better, it's an acceptable amount. Servers break, people need to deal with it when they do, and we aren't all robots.

I would call that an edge case and launch the rocket. Just drop a comment about it in the FAQ.

Unless, your product is strictly about multiple Google accouncts in which case you are shafted. :)

That's 50% of users. All we needed was one user out of however many were on the domain to remark and the feedback was "sort out the details" and these were the details.

As also mentioned, the availability of Drive documents to our apps and the app integration working correctly was also a factor.

I think that Google is wasting huge ammounts of goodwil through its lame operation of GAB.

One does not simply not run a customer service.

Edit: To add a bit more substance to this comment. I kinda know wahat you are going through. I took it upon myself (after numerous have failed) to push through something that looked like a pretty nasty bug in Lotus Domino 8 server and client. Basically what I found out during research is 20% of IBM 852 (its internal datatype) was simply corrupt.

And boy for the longest time nobody responded. There were IBM SWAT Team Leaders guarding the sacred Process that would insist on telling me that there is no Bugs in their platform and that it is obviously my fault. It took six months, an extremely detailed testing procedure with test cases and invoking a lot of connections to get my report infront of a person that could actually understand what is going on.

Soon after that I received a hotfix. I had to repeat the whole procedure another two times. And by the third time I could get it done in three months. I basically made the blue elephant dance just for me.

So for what its worth my advice is to invoke every and all connections within Google not to just get your issues within an internal Google issue tracker. You need to find out (from the outside) who is the guy responsible for the general area that is causing you problems, then keep in touch with this person and after some time you will get your fix(es).

I've evaluated what they are doing on their technical merit. If you want me to give you a detailed explanation of why I prefer their system, it'd probably take about an hour, so it's a bit much as a HN comment.

I genuinely think their direction with the API I'm using is the way forward, I've been waiting for someone to have the balls to do it for some time.

Any anyway, I must have missed the outpouring of love Google received for closing Reader, for not having a native Google Linux kernel OS Drive client, and so on.

That's your problem. Google is phenomenal on their technical merit. It's the softer, people skills (support, listening to bug reports, etc.) where they constantly shoot themselves in the foot.

It is precisely technical merit where they fell down and that's why he decided against the development.

They turn into Microsoft where brilliant engineers are bogged down by corrupt management :)

If they'd turn evil over night or just stop existing, we'd still have a big net positive left. Not something that can be said for some competitors.

WebM is just an pointless nuisance. The world already has a open, video standard that is widely supported, technically superior and stewarded by a wide array of competing companies. And it's only royalty free because nobody can be bothered to sue them yet. It definitely is patent encumbered (see MPEG-LA's recent 'gift' of patents to VP8).

SPDY was another technology that was developed by Google unilaterally instead of working through the existing IETF process. If Google didn't own Chrome it simply would have never taken of.

And the fact that SPDY was developed unilaterally doesn't take away from Google's generosity in making it available to the world. It's generally well-regarded, and Google haven't attempted to limit it's use by other browsers in any way - much the opposite. Can you imagine Microsoft doing the same when they were the dominant browser?

Again, I'm not saying they introduced either of these technologies from pure altruism. But I am saying I'm glad they exist, and Google's approach to IP is a welcome breath of fresh air (so far).

Anybody has collected more down's for one comment, or is this some kind of record?