This image was lost some time after publication.

Google engineering manager Andrew Zaeske is all but breaking his arm patting himself on the back for launching Google Sites to the public, after testing the wiki tool among Google Apps customers, a group of mostly business users who use customized versions of Gmail and other Web-based Google software. One of those customers would just as soon have Zaeske talk to the hand:

Been struggling for days with Google Sites, even calling in help from Google Intergalactic HQ. Well as of this moment Google Sites is effectively down, having apparently lost all of our data and a few hundred thousand other wikis. Google Sites was real problems, not prime time.

It's possible the problems were related to reengineering Google Sites for non-Google Apps users. But still, one would think that if Google were serious about taking on Microsoft, which makes a competing product, SharePoint, it would have worked out the bugs before launch.