With Xerox offering to pay a healthy premium for Affiliated Computer Services just a week after Dell announced its acquisition of Perot Systems, investors and customers alike will have to hope that competition in back-office outsourcing will be healthy for profits as well as service.

But those of Xerox have a reason for skepticism here. The company is anything but new to the computer business, and its history isn't at all reassuring.

As Michael Eggebrecht, my colleague at sister-site CIOZone reported, the two-hours of radio silence inadvertently observed by Gmail this week has touched off a great debate.

Specifically, the interruption in Google's much-ballyhooed email system has triggered heated arguments about the future of cloud computing. It's also apparently raised questions about whether businesses should risk switching to Gmail -- and that's a market Google is definitely ogling. Indeed, the downtime raised concerns about whether businesses should bail on cloud computing, board up their windows, and pretend nobody's home when the doorbell rings.