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Gmail Gedanken experiment

2 points by vidar ↗ HN
In honor of the recent gmail outage.Lets imagine that Google somehow caught a perfect storm and actually lost all gmail data. All of it. (I realize this is as close to impossible as you can get, but that's why it's a gedanken experiment). What would happen?

2 comments

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Rod
Google would lose all their credibility? People would realize that having all their data in the cloud is not risk-free?

This doomsday scenario sounds so unlikely that it gets to the point of being ludicrous...

mmc
Because so many people use it for business communication, I think it'd have long-term effects on the economy that would be really difficult (but interesting) to measure.

It's not a perfect example, because you can get your mails out of GMail, but - This kind of thing might be what it takes to pass legislation forcing data services to provide access (see http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1617 )