The good news is that Google's products and services are generally pretty reliable especially when considering the scale they operate at. The bad news is that when there is an issue, you will be in the dark as to what the issue is or when it will be resolved.

If there were one area it would be nice to see Google improve in, it would be on the support and communications front. Their current approach, beyond their internal tools to monitor and manage their servers, seems to be 'if enough people complain, it's probably a problem and we'll fix it... eventually.' While it's true enough that most of their services are free, it doesn't really matter when there's a problem. The problem is compounded when there's no way to get any meaningful feedback or updates during the course of the issue or outage.

Today's Google Voice outage reminded me that this is still an area where dealing with Google can be less than wonderful. The outage isn't even the main issue... it is the complete lack of any sort of communication from Google about what's going on or when it might be expected to be resolved. The only option seems to be to go to the support forums where a lot of other unhappy users are posting about the problem without any official representation from Google. How hard would it be to write a simple post indicating 'hey, sorry about that... the is currently down and we are investigating. We'll post an update when we know more which we expect will be in about X ' followed up either by periodic updates or a post indicating the problem was resolved. When there is an outage/issue (with Voice or any other product or service), it would be appreciated if Google were more responsive in their support forums and communicative about longer term issues and it would go a long way to making whatever the particular issue of the moment is easier to live with and work around.