But if you stored it locally you would still have downtime. Downtime (problems) are inevitable. It's just that only you would notice, so it might not get on the news.

I doubt the actual uptime would be that different for any one person.

The difference is that you can know what's wrong and fix it (assuming you're able). Also, over the past 2+ years, my mail server has had less downtime than GMail, and any outages were easy for me to diagnose and fix. I like feeling in control over critical pieces of my business (at least as much as possible - I'm in no position to build my own DC for instance).

Google is a better sysadmin than I am. I assume most people are in the same boat.

I know google hires some people who are better than me, but that doesn't mean the gmail system is better than something I could engineer.... For one thing, google needs to have a much lower cost per user than I do, forcing them to make some choices that I don't have to. I have no problem paying $50 a month for email service, and that level of cost per user would be untenable on a free email service. (I host most of my email myself, and I'm trading a free co-lo to mark perkel of junkemailfilter.com to do my filtering. between that and my time, I'd guess $50/month)

This is true, but also very unfortunate, as GMail is often a poor substitute for a well-administered in-house e-mail system.

Running a mail system for 10 people is a lot easier than running one for a few million.

This phrase comes to mind... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgkBpWc8ngI#t=4m18s

second that. And now techcrunch down too.

http://www.techcrunch.com/ doesn't seems to be down :-/