The cloud is all the rage. Vendors of all shapes and sizes are in a race to move as many products and services as possible to the cloud – providing managed services and software-as-a-service rather than traditional, locally-installed, software applications.

There are many major players investing in moving customers to the cloud. Amazon has a cloud computing offering and recently bolstered it with a more secure, segregated private cloud service. Microsoft provides hosted online productivity services and recently rolled out the technical preview of Office Web Apps, delivering Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote from the cloud.

Google is arguably the primary champion of cloud computing. The Web is what Google does. Google has a virtually endless list of products and services that are all delivered via the Web from the cloud.

Google is not content with dominating Web search or search engine advertising. It has an ongoing crusade to deliver business productivity from the Web. Google is taking on Microsoft head-to-head across a range of markets in an effort to wrest control from the desktop and move the computing experience to the Web.

That crusade has had relative success. Many users and businesses have found that Google Docs can fill their office productivity needs. Gmail can fulfill their e-mail needs. Google Calendar provides scheduling. Google Talk delivers instant messaging. Basically, Google has enough tools and services to fulfill virtually all of the productivity and communications needs for an organization…from the Web.

The problem is that Google has experienced repeated issues with service outages. Here are just a few of the headline-making outages:

· September 24, 2009: Gmail outage

· September 22, 2009: Google News outage

· September 1, 2009: Gmail outage

· May 14, 2009: Google network outage

· May 18, 2009: Google News outage

· March 9, 2009: Gmail outage

· August 7, 2008: Gmail and Google Apps outage

These repeated outages damage the credibility of the cloud. Enterprises that are considering the pros and cons of moving office productivity or communications to the cloud have reason to be concerned when the poster child of cloud computing can’t provide reliable availability.

The cloud offers many potential advantages for customers, but one of the biggest factors driving apprehension and impeding adoption is availability. Customers are reluctant to offload productivity and communication to the cloud if the possibility exists for the cloud to disappear. Productivity and communication are mission-critical aspects for businesses and reliable availability is not negotiable.

David Coursey summed it up nicely, stating “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? ”

Google can help improve the reputation of the cloud and further its own agenda to make desktop applications obsolete and move everything to the Web by ensuring that the products and services it provides are as reliable as they are functional.

Since Google launched its free Web-mail service on April Fool’s day of 2004, it has insisted that Gmail’s labeling system–in which you can tag messages with one or more labels like “work,” “repeatedly forwarded jokes,” “spam,” etc.–works better than traditional folders for organizing your messages.

That argument has some logic to it: With labels, you can file a message in more than one place, just as playlists work in a music program. But many Gmail users have spent too much time with folder-centric mail programs to give that up. Many others don’t bother with labels at all–at one point, only 29 percent of Gmail users had created even one, the Mountain View, Calif., company revealed in a blog post yesterday.

Back in February, Google relented on its label-centric view, adding a “Move To” command that both applies a label to a message and transfers it from Gmail’s seemingly endless inbox to an archive folder, named after that label.

Yesterday, Google conceded a little more. Gmail now displays your labels just below its real folders (Inbox, Sent, Drafts, Spam). You can label a message by dragging a label from that list onto the message. And you can label and move messages in one step by dragging them onto the label listed at the right–the same action you’d use to chuck that e-mail into a folder in a program like Microsoft’s Outlook or Apple’s Mail.

If you’d place yourself in the folder-traditionalist camp, are these latest Gmail tweaks good enough for you? If you’d rather categorize yourself as a labeler, has Google compromised the concept too much with this step? Sound off in the comments… but, please, not if that would get in the way of watching parades, setting off fireworks, catching a baseball game or other appropriate July 4th weekend activities.