Remember when Gmail debuted? It was slick, it was powerful, and Google's surreptitious "invite-only" soft-launch smacked of breezy insouciance. What a cool company, what a great app. Only one problem: Gmail didn't work.

Half the time I tried to log in, the service was unavailable.

E-mails from my clients disappeared or never arrived in the first place. It took them six months to stabilize what should have been the most reliable of Web applications, and even today I get errors.

How about the Google Reader that debuted last month? Same story.

It didn't work. I started using it the week it debuted. Pretty interface, great keyboard shortcuts. But the RSS feeds didn't refresh correctly.

Sometimes, the app didn't work at all, and I'd be suspended in that interminable online hell we all euphemistically refer to as "loading."

I switched back to Bloglines and haven't looked back.

And yesterday, I tried to take a look at Google Analytics. Guess what? That didn't work, either.

Click here to read more about Google Analytics.

I did get a custom "service unavailable" page, which seems to me, at this point, like smiling at your customers while you're flicking them off.

What's up Google? Why do you keep slashdotting yourself?

I wasn't the only one who was a bit miffed. I've seen quite a few grousers on blogs.

Ethan Stock, CEO of Zvents (who also throws a great pizza party), had a rough time with the service as well and summed up the problem nicely.

Eventually I get in to Urchin. Urchin is getting slammed with traffic. We hear all this hoorah about Google's hundreds of thousands of servers and their ability to host applications, and all I can say is, if casual interest in a service you aren't even accepting new registrations for grinds you to a halt like this, you are nothing like ready for prime time… When I finally do get in to Urchin, I have no data since 3pm yesterday. That's 24 hours without data. Zero. Zip. None. I'm trying to run my business here, folks! Hello?

I agree with Ethan 110 percent. There's no dearth of servers at Google. Hell, the original Urchin service was supposedly supported by a humongous server farm that could manage terabytes of data.

I'm not interested in explanations that include the words "beta" or "emerging technology" or "soft launch."

I'm a big believer in iterative development, and I understand that product release cycles are quicker and more complicated these days.

But you would think that the world's most powerful search engine company (or is that advertising company?) would handle its product launches with a bit more competence and a little less savoir fair.

Could that be the problem? Is Google more interested in style than substance? Or is it that it relies on computer automation too often and human input isn't enough?

Google has amazing technology. It's a superb advertising company. It's damn good at marketing, viral or otherwise.

And it has the best search engine, which is why the links above point to Google search pages.

But its other applications suffer from quality problems, and that relative disregard for quality implies a relative disregard for its customers.

Some critics have noted that Google is big enough and powerful enough that it doesn't really need to worry about criticism, or what other companies are doing. It exists, and we have to deal with it.

But since we're dealing with it, I'd appreciate it if it made its applications stable.

Otherwise, eventually, I'm going to start associating the Google brand with unreliable.

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