Within less than a month of the hour-long September 1 outage of Google's Gmail service, another one followed yesterday - bringing the Web-based e-mail service down for nearly two hours.

The outage, affecting a small percentage of Gmail users, blocked their accessibility to their e-mail accounts, contact lists, and related functions.

Other than these outages of service, Google has, of late, also witnessed a recent disruption in the Google News site as well. Such outages indicate that either the emerging cloud computing industry is going kaput, or that potential service providers looking to develop cloud-based services stand a fair chance.

Google, which is a cloud computing market champ, has an exhaustive list of products and services that are all delivered via the Web from the cloud. In addition, it is also attempting to offer business productivity from the Web.

However, the frequent outages clearly make the reliability of the cloud a pertinent and questionable issue, which can easily mar the prospects pertaining to the move of the enterprises' office productivity or communications to the cloud.

Hence, summing it all up for Google, David Coursey said: "Rather than adding features that add only questionable value to our lives, such as Sidewiki and Fast Flip news, maybe Google needs to stop, take a deep breath, and focus on quality and reliability for products many of us use every day!"