News of an outage of from eight to 12 hours involving Microsoft’s Exchange Online email system came shortly after the company announced a huge expansion of the OneDrive cloud storage service. So you get 15GB free, and 1GB if you subscribe to one of the Office 365 services. There are also individual packages covering just the storage, but Office 365 is the best value, obviously, since you get the full suite of Office apps for Mac, Windows or iPad. In turn, Google’s Drive for Work, at $10 per user, offers its own suite of online apps and email, plus unlimited storage space.

But what good is all that storage if the service is unreliable?

In this case, the outage did not impact users who accessed their Exchange email from a corporate server, or a third-party email host, such as FuseMail, PolarisMail or Rackspace. I suppose that may argue against depending on Microsoft’s sprawling cloud system, but it can happen to anyone. Rackspace’s email system was down a few months back due to a DDoS hacker attack that persisted for over a day.

If you think Google might be a suitable alternative, even if you pay for their business services and turn off the ads, don’t forget that they’ve had outages too, and the same is true for Amazon, iCloud and other systems. Perfection remains the unfulfilled dream.

Besides, it’s not that Exchange is the only game in town. In addition to Gmail, there’s Open-XChange, intended to be a friendlier and less expensive Exchange alternative that a number of major web hosts, including Namecheap, offer. What’s more, the other email hosting services are adding more and more collaborative features to enhance business email, and some of them cost no more than a dollar or two per user for gobs of message storage. So nobody’s locked into Microsoft by any means.

I do wonder, though, whether Apple might consider offering a business alternative to iCloud email, where you can add your own business domain. It does seem that Apple is moving in that direction by expanding iWork for iCloud and making it easier for multiple users to collaborate on documents. Again, though, it’s clear that the cloud is far from perfection, and few can claim that you’ll be free of service outages.

And for those who have followed the sometimes ridiculous political byplay in Washington, even the IRS cannot guarantee a reliable email system, or that employees won’t suffer from hard drive breakdowns and thus lose supposedly critical messages. But that’s what happens when you choose the lowest bidder. Even if Microsoft came in an offered to fix government email systems, why take them seriously?

It also seems as if lots of people take the cheap way out with email, even when conducting business. If you’re not using the service offered by your ISP, or AOL, it’s apt to be Yahoo or Gmail. Microsoft’s free Outlook service, the one formerly known as Hotmail or Live, doesn’t get near as much use, at least in the messages I receive.

One report I read claimed that workers may spend an average of 28% of their workday dealing with composing and reading email. Phone calls? Well, maybe that’s just old fashioned. I know that I’ve made fairly large deals over the years with advertisers via email and, when I was writing tech books, for new titles. I seldom talked to anyone on the phone, even for deal making, the editorial process and inquiring as to the status of a payment.

What all this means, then, is that a typical company is highly dependent on email. Even orders handled by a shopping cart system will present themselves in emails, as will notices from your bank or other financial institution. Without email, you are more or less handicapped.

Yes, there is the telephone, but I find that I spend very little time actually talking to people, although I’m not involved in a business where conversation is paramount except, of course, for my two radio shows. And, yes, I do talk to my wife, and I do, on occasion, have a real conversation with my son, via a Skype connection since he lives in Madrid.

Regardless, and for better or worse, it’s a sure thing that a company may live or die on the basis of email. But how can you be sure that the service you choose will be there for you 24/7? The answer is, of course, that you can’t. Maybe the best alternative is to set up a second email system as a backup, even a free one, so you can stay in touch with the people you need to reach even when the primary email server is on the blink.

It’s still true, though, that people will forget the Microsoft outage soon enough, just as they will probably forget the next one and one after that. That’s also the case for the outages experienced by other email systems.

But as you and I depend more and more on cloud-based services to conduct business, the onus is on the companies who provide those services to fix the problems — and soon.

On the heels of my recent commentary about what Apple might be doing to pave the way for an iWatch, an investment bank that engages in industry analysis, Piper Jaffray, suggested prospects were dim. This was all based on a survey that indicated that only 14% of those questioned would consider buying an iWatch if the price came in at $350.

However, that’s not the entire story. The numbers change substantially in response to the question of how many would buy one if it carried a lower price. Here the financial sweet spot is between $100 and $200, where 36% said they’d buy one, so if the iWatch comes in at $199, that might be an ingredient for success. In saying that, 41% said they wouldn’t get one regardless of price.

However, the real figure is that over 58% would buy an iWatch of some sort, depending on price. This is the number that the media will ignore, since it is perceived Apple’s mythical gadget must be hugely expensive. Of course, if it has a built-in phone, it may well be that a carrier subsidy would reduce the price substantially. What’s more, if the price were identical to the Pebble Steel, at $249, maybe that wouldn’t be perceived as so much of a jump from the $200 level.

This survey is highly misleading. You see, one of Apple’s edicts is to build gear and/or add features that people didn’t know they wanted, but loved once they became available. The fact of the matter is that the smartwatch space is little different from the digital music player space in 2001 before the iPod arrived. There’s a growing number of products that pretty much carry a similar set of features, and similar form factors. None are mass market successes. But when you use them as the basis from which to judge the potential for an iWatch, it may well be that the demand isn’t terribly high.

But assuming Apple does make an iWatch, nobody really knows what it’ll look like beyond the image of a normal wristwatch. Even though there are reports it is entering production, the situation isn’t the same as the presumed iPhone 6, where there are loads of alleged photos of a case and internal components, supposedly leaked from the supply chain, which appear to fall within a similar range.

The iWatch? We have seen concepts, but nothing that represents a component cribbed from the supply chain. We’ve heard speculation about OLED bendable screens, presumed screen sizes and the expected use of Apple’s HealthKit and HomeKit technologies. But not a lick of it can be confirmed obviously.

What this means is that the survey is seriously flawed. If it were taken after the final form factor and features of the mythical iWatch were revealed — and that would have to come from Apple — it might bear some validity. That it is limited to people with average household incomes of $130,000 means that the sampling is heavily weighted towards fairly well-off people, with a higher percentage of females. Worse, the sampling is small, some 100 people, which really impacts the accuracy.

So one assumes that people with lower family incomes would be even less inclined to spring for an iWatch in any configuration. Regardless, you can be sure the survey will be used to advance the claims that people don’t really want an iWatch after all.

In contrast, a survey of 4,000 from RBC Capital Markets of smartphone owners appears to have more credibility. It reports that roughly half of those who were questioned that plan to upgrade their smartphones in the next three months have an iPhone in their sights. Of these, 25% would pay an extra $100 to get the rumored 5.5-inch iPhone 6.

All right.

Still, in addition to the larger sampling, this survey is more believable simply because the iPhone is a known quantity, and we have the existing form factor and features by which to judge an iPhone 6.

Now I do not pretend to have a glimmer of an idea about the real demand for the iWatch. One based on existing products and possible pricing doesn’t really count. I’m sure Apple’s marketing team is quite aware on the impact of prices, but remember that the first iPod came in at $399, much more than the competition. People complained, but sales soared.

But to command a higher price, Apple would have to offer something in an iWatch that’s just not being duplicated in a Pebble, or a Samsung Galaxy Gear, or any other company’s vision of a wearable gadget of this sort. It wouldn’t just be to make a technology statement. Even the high-end Mac Pro is priced to appeal to a professional user for whom price doesn’t matter all that much. It’s about the ability to get work done, not just to look pretty or different.

It’s also obvious that Apple’s recent pricing moves on the Mac platform reveal a sensitivity that some didn’t expect. But I don’t expect Apple to build an iWatch to meet a price point. Still, there may be several configurations that make fashion statements, which would mean there would be expensive versions that might be classified as jewelry in the fashion of an expensive traditional wristwatch. But the entry-level would be acceptable to a mass market — if the features, the look and the performance made a difference.

So while I don’t disapprove of surveys, I do think it’s a little early to assume price resistance to an iWatch beyond what you’d expect for any product at a given price, however compelling.

It has been rumored for several years, and last week, Amazon announced their first foray into the smartphone business. But unlike existing Kindle products, it is not being sold at or near cost. Instead the Fire Phone costs very much the same as the iPhone 5s and the Samsung Galaxy S4, which portends a decent profit. When it ships, you’ll be able to buy one with an AT&T contract for $199, or without a contract for $649. Yes, it comes with a standard 32GB storage, compared to 16GB for the other smartphones, which may make it a somewhat better value.

The theory, of course, is that people who buy Kindle gear would be more inclined to buy stuff from Amazon, thus producing enough extra revenue to cover the cost of selling cheaper hardware. But the Fire Phone is clearly meant to earn its keep, even if you include the cost of the extra storage, which isn’t substantial. I’m sure it’s obvious to most of you that Apple and other hardware makers seriously overcharge you on higher capacity smartphones and tablets.

No matter. The Fire Phone runs on a seriously altered version of Android, and thus exists in its own ecosystem. If you switch, you will get a product that’s tailor made to access Amazon’s storefront. You may even be pleased with the Dynamic Perspective feature, offering tilt, auto-scroll, swivel and such.

Some of this reminds me of similar features in the Samsung Galaxy S4 that simply failed to work. Until Amazon’s smartphone is available and is fully tested, I won’t assume any of these extra features are as bad as Samsung’s implementation. But the perspective feature sort of reminds me of what Apple did with iOS 7, a feature that was roundly criticized by some, and thus forced Apple to deliver a way to shut the thing off for those who complained about feelings of dizziness or nausea when tilting their iPhones or iPads.

Overall, however, it’s not that the Fire Phone is offering must-have features that would persuade customers to choose it over an iOS or Android handset. Even if you’re a loyal Amazon customer, you can use their iOS or Android apps to check out products and make purchases. The Fire Phone’s interface, at first glance of the published reports, doesn’t strike me as so unique that it necessarily presents an all-new or even reasonably altered perspective on what you can get now. Even the hardware doesn’t seem to be necessarily any better than your typical high-end Android handset.

At least if you don’t like the iOS or Android way of doing things — and they are similar in many respects — you have Windows Phone. That’s decidedly different, and, to some, a better way. But I say some, since Microsoft’s mobile platform hasn’t done very well compared to the market leaders.

Certainly the Fire Phone doesn’t seem the sort of device that necessarily attracts switchers, particularly those who are heavily invested in another app ecosystem. It’ll take years — if ever — for Amazon’s app storefront to become as substantial as the others are now. But for someone entering the market for the first time, particularly if they are heavily invested in buying stuff from Amazon, it might be a practical alternative.

This doesn’t mean Amazon was wrong to introduce a device that competes with the other products they sell. They make take the position that it doesn’t matter so much in the end. Whatever product you buy from their sprawling online catalog, they get paid, and profits are larger when they build it. While the Fire Phone will surely get a decent amount of coverage for a while, particularly when complete reviews appear, I just wonder whether it’ll vanish from everywhere but Amazon’s home page after a while.

It doesn’t help that Amazon made a deal with just one wireless carrier — AT&T. That may have made sense for Apple in 2007, with an unproven product in a new category. More important, Apple required full control of the interface and the software, something the carriers had never granted. Only the smash success of the iPhone made it possible to extend that deal to hundreds of other carriers around the world over the next few years.

Amazon is starting from scratch. The real question is whether they can make a difference, or whether it’s just too late for a new contender to get into the game. By not discounting, perhaps Amazon is still taking baby steps to see where the product goes. By restricting availability to a single carrier, they have more control over the sales process, and do not have to worry about building alternate versions, or even a large quantity of handsets. Perhaps Amazon is just testing the waters to see if there’s real demand for a new smartphone platform.

Of course, Amazon doesn’t reveal sales of existing Kindle hardware, and the educated guesses are all over the place. Clearly they are sufficient to carry on, but I wonder if the Fire Phone is trying to fill a demand that doesn’t really exist in sufficient quantities to make sense.

Contrary to what the Apple critics say over and over again, a lot of the things Apple is doing are innovative. From Swift, a new programming language, to the HealthKit and HomeKit features in iOS 8, there are huge improvements in Apple’s software capabilities.

Even better, there are rich opportunities for independent developers to create new generations of apps for iOS and OS X, not to mention innovative hardware that supports HealthKit and HomeKit. From a practical standpoint, developers ought to be salivating over the new ways to build products and earn comfortable livings. Nothing wrong with that, except for the silly complaints that the WWDC — a developer event — didn’t include any new hardware.

As people wonder just what new hardware Apple may release come fall, the iWatch, Apple’s variation on the smartwatch theme, is getting heavy-duty attention. Without going into unproven details, the new gadget may actually be going into production shortly. There may be multiple screen sizes, and as many as 10 (or more) onboard sensors to measure your physical condition, the position and placement of the device and things we haven’t thought about yet.

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