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Comment by Scoundreller | Hacker News Reader

At work, I wanted to use google sheets for our schedule because it just works: can have view only links, and it handles multiple editors at the same time gracefully. Got asked “well what if google goes down?”, so back to our problematic system of excel sheets it is :(

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As much as GSheets is great software in theory, "just works" is something I'd never use to describe it. Google is the absolute worst when it comes to keeping stuff working outside of Gmail, Search and obviously Ads. They will silently drop functionality and randomly break things without any recourse.

Just a week or so ago, the IMPORTHTML/XML and related functions in GSheets just...stopped working. There are Reddit and Google Helpdesk threads about it so it's clearly a global issue. As far as I know, no fix has landed yet.

I had to spend a weekend writing a bunch of scripts to reimplement importing functionality so an international competition hosting more than 600 people from 28 countries wouldn't collapse on the spot. Everyone on the team, including me, was initially glad we were using GSheets as it made our work much easier - until it suddenly made it much, much harder.

That may have been a wise person! "What if Google takes us down" (rather than goes down itself) is a valid business risk to at least consider.

Google & co are doing their best to remove themselves from a rational person's critical path. They're too big, you're too small; they're full of AI and politics, you have no recourse.

if someone had told me that "full of AI" was going to be an insult one day, I would have said they were too cynical about the glorious AI future, but in hindsight perhaps you are right

I experienced the opposite when Google actually went down and all of our email, docs and information went away for the day. Then one day our Internet went down and then the company bought a Microwave internet link and an off site server.

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