Here's a specific example from last week. Last week, Google royally f'd up the release of the new Login Challenges interstitial, which wasn't supposed to be pr

Here's a specific example from last week. Last week, Google royally f'd up the release of the new Login Challenges interstitial, which wasn't supposed to be presented to SSO domains but was. This caused much consternation, especially since because this was primarily a consumer-focused feature, there was no advance notice given to Apps domain admins. This ties into the second big problem re: Apps administration and Google's product roadmap / release process: there is almost no correlation between feature requests Apps admins make and their mapping onto a product roadmap. Additionally, for features or new services that are kept secret as a business strategy, even Apps admins don't get any advance notice. The first we see them is when they are released to production. It is entirely unclear what the relationship is between Bill Hippenmeyer's team, the actual PM & Apps product engineering teams, and the Google Enterprise Connect team, and by all outward appearances there is almost no strong link whatsoever. So, regardless of how Google handles things on the consumer side, those behaviors adversely affect paying customers ... and when you are paying millions of dollars per year (as an alternative to paying Microsoft or IBM millions of dollars per year) that's a big turn off. Google is far more opaque re: roadmap than traditional vendors. (I'm not bashing all things Google, just this one thing. I'm still a huge fan. :) )