LiveJournal, SaaS, and the Trust Problem

LiveJournal, SaaS, and the Trust Problem: "Perhaps the biggest problem with software-as-a-service is that a vendor able to give you everything can also take it all away, sometimes accidentally. We saw an example of this over the weekend.
LiveJournal, the big blog vendor, was down for more than 24 hours after a power outage hit both the regular and the back-up power at their outsourced data center.
The LiveJournal techs deserve credit for being what appears to have been upfront about the problem--including telling customers this was the second time there's been an outage. Why it was allowed to a second time is something LiveJournal's customers ought to be asking.
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One of the things I am going to start checking when I write about SaaS vendors is how easily customers can keep local copies of their own files."

Don't get your hopes up... BTW it's not just files -- it's the ability to continue using applications when network-disconnected. These are features of products such as Notes and Groove that are very difficult to implement reliably/robustly.