Sorry but I have little sympathy and I don't want to hear the "well it works for me excuses" and the financial advantage crap.
Yeah, let's ignore the success stories and the financial benefits because it what is sort of a race scenario, Google's support failed. This seems like a bug and resolvable as noted by others in the thread.
You have a really obvious chip on your shoulder.
If we were to deploy google apps and that happen we'd be down approximately £120,000 a day (we actually make money).
That's when they employed me to fix it all and make sure that it was engineered properly and that there was a DR policy in place.
You can't have a DR policy in place for functionality that cannot be moved from the cloud so imagine the above with no hope of recovery.
You don't - you have to migrate and retrain everyone, which if you've used all the features in your cloud platform requires major process and tooling rewrites.
With an offline solution, you can shelve it and migrate slowly. When someone else hosts it, you're at their mercy.
You mean google apps? Well, you could keep a local copy of office around, it's not exactly rocket science.
When someone else hosts it, you're at their mercy.
And when you host it, you're at your own mercy.
Matching the availability of google tends to cost a little more than a hypothetical day of downtime would.
There are plenty valid concerns about hosting your office in the cloud. However, availability and TCO are normally the main arguments for google apps, not the other way round. Those infrastructure costs really add up when you're talking thousands of seats.
If you have thousands of seats, you should have the budget lying around to do it properly and a team of people to handle it. The TCO if you include risk is an order of magnitude lower if you manage it yourself. I've done the figures enough times for enough companies to know this.
Most companies operate "on the line". An event like this would take them offline permanently.
I guess we'll just have to agree on disagreeing here.