It hasn’t been a great week all round for cloud services. On Wednesday, Google Docs had an outage that lasted anything from 30 minutes to an hour, frustrating users who couldn’t do any work because all their data was “in the cloud”. The need for offline access for Google Docs was underlined and I hope that Google deliver on their plans to deliver this capability soon. My take on the two outages is reported on WindowsITPro.com.

Amusingly some folks who monitored the Twitter feed about the Office 365 outage suggested that customers consider IBM’s cloud equivalent, LotusLive. Based on the recent experiences of Microsoft and Google, one wonders when IBM is due to have a major outage for its cloud services. Talk about tempting fate!

On another note, it’s great to see the Rugby World Cup (RWC) begin in New Zealand. I thought that George Clancy refereed the opening game very well and on a professional note, the two TMO calls were easy enough. The first was the more difficult as the question was whether the trailing boot had hit the touch line before the ball was grounded. Good high-definition TV delivered all the necessary visual evidence. The second call was resolved by an excellent angle from a camera on the left-hand touch line that clearly showed the Tongan grounding.

The last try gave NZ some relief as they probably wouldn’t have been too happy with a scoreline of 34-10 given the excellent start made by the All Blacks. 41-10 reflected a good second half by Tonga that gives them some hope for the remainder of RWC. Now we wait for Sunday when Ireland take on USA!

– Tony