Earlier this week I wrote about Google’s downtime issues with Google Docs and warned that they and other vendors (including Microsoft) are really going to have to get their acts together to convince Joe User that cloud computing is mature enough for anyone to use. Right now, it’s not in my opinion and frankly is one of the reasons Live Mesh isn’t launched. I hope our rigorous testing and geographic restrictions on use pay off and I’m not left eating humble pie when it does launch.

Meantime it seems some Apple customers have become accustomed to the issues. I found this a surprising quote in Mercury News

 

Robert Palmer, a paid blogger for Time Warner Inc.-owned The Unofficial Apple Weblog, many conveying their own technical difficulties with the site. Palmer, who also works as a graphic designer in San Diego, has used .Mac for e-mail and sharing files with clients for eight years. He was able to access his files during the outage using desktop programs; the outage won't keep him from using MobileMe because, he said, .Mac has a long history of going dark.

 

If I was paying $99 I’m not sure I’d be so lenient. I pay $30 per year for a Flick Pro account and went ballistic when that was inaccessible for me and that was just with personal information, not corporate data.

As I’ve been saying over the last few months, cloud computing is on it’s way in a big way but it’s still quite immature.

[update] Om has a good personal riff on this too.