As much as I can understand Ted Dziuba anger, from my understanding GAE is still beta. And beta means you should not put mission critical systems on it nor should you deploy anything on it that should makes your living.

But there is also not doubt that Goolge needs to improve on communication and increase transparency.

Google has never been great at transparency. TFA lists an example of Amazon's response to a similar outage of S3. Anyone who has to account to customers for an outage could take a page from Amazon's response.

Google really does need to do some soul searching about how it interacts with customers. The "message board with occasional employee presence" model is fine for consumer-based free apps... But when it's a paid, enterprise solution – as both Apps and App Engine are being positioned – it's not gonna fly. If you don't think App Engine is being positioned to the enterprise, google up the "app engine secure data connector," a tool to allow app engine apps to access data inside your corporate firewall.

Google's answer to support on the apps side is to partner with companies that provide support, which is fine... for supporting end users. But when the IT department sees that the cloud is down, how's a third party going to address that? Is offering traditional technical support really that alien to Google that they can't get the ball rolling on it? Having worked with enterprise customers from a support and engineering perspective, they will not use a product unless they can setup a con call bridge with real people in the company to discuss issues and mitigate them when things go astray.