[sgift]

This reminds of a story I've read about (big) companies and electricity: At the start of the 20th century it was typical for companies to produce their own electricity. The concerns where basically the same as they are now with Internet services: Your business depends on another company; what will you do if they close down? Or throw you out? And what about the transmission - I've heard the net is not stable? and so on. So, what did change? Trust. Electric companies invested heavily in various areas:

  - Reliability. The electric transmission net was shit at this time. Blackouts each week, sometimes each day were typical
  - Cross-transmission i.e. a shared transmission net instead of one net per provider, so you could switch without much hassle if your provider failed you
  - Better contracts to guarantee that you will get your electricity and that a company cannot dump you without notice

All of this parts worked together to convince companies that electricity was no longer something you had to do yourself, but something that could be provided by someone else. As far as I can tell Google tries to be the outsourcing address for various (all?) net related services which have been done "in house" in the past. The problem seems to be that they fail in the areas highlighted above. As long as this doesn't change many companies will be hesitant to trust Google with services they depend on. And maybe posts like the OPs (and robomartins) show that they are correct in their assessment.

[jiggy2011]

Aren't electric companies also heavily regulated?

AFAIK they can't just cut your power one day because you tripped some arbitrary secret metric.

[powercycle]

Given that there is common law "duty to serve" protection, how is it that many electric utilities are now offering discounts in exchange for installing devices that give them the power to throttle your air conditioner during a heat wave?

[jbooth]

Probably nobody's challenged them on it, and moreover if they did there'd be the counter-arguments that it's voluntary and that throttling the A/C enhances their service by preventing brownouts.

[dhimes]

And, besides, it says right there in the TOS that you clicked through to create the account that....

[mkup]

Well, there is a plenty of electricity providers, but just one Google.

[bconway]

Really? Most people in the US only have access to one, the same as cable providers. Government-granted monopoly, etc...