[bigiain]

Exactly my point. If you're making changes to mission-critical things, you need to have both reliable information on how long those changes will take, as well as rollback plans to cover the risk of things going wrong.

Randomly clicking things like "change my email system" buttons, then complaining afterwards that it didn't work how you expected is the sort of mistake most of us have made at least once.

Once you've suffered through those mistakes, you tend to view phrases like "expected behavior" and "seemingly a mere administration change" a lot more suspiciously.

If it's mission critical, don't "assume", don't "expect" - things are often not as they "seem". As they say "Trust, but verify." Yeah, Google (or Rackspace, or MessageLabs) will _presumably_ "get it right", but when the consequences of "presuming" are business-destroyingly-high, verify the presumptions first.