In the following roundup of observations about Google's embrace of failures, both technical and user-created, notice how deliberately planning for failures can lead to new features rather than merely an obstacle.

1. Ever sent an email too hastily and forgotten to include an attachment?

I have. More often than I really would like to admit. It has happened so often, in fact, that at Terra Eclipse HQ "See Attached" qualifies as an Office Bingo square (stay tuned for more on office bingo).

But wouldn't it be great if your email client intelligently parsed your message for attachment-indicating-phrases? Some mistakes are just bonehead, careless mistakes, but if many users are susceptible, then perhaps it warrants a redesign.

Ask and ye shall receive: A Gmail Labs intern has attempted to provide a catch-all solution to that pesky email faux pa:

While its language parsing leaves much to be desired (neither "I've enclosed..." or "Included the files" or "See below" trigger the reminder), it's a proof of concept for future failure-error-correction I greatly encourage.

2. Browser crashed and your half finished blog post along with it?

Google's Chrome team re-engineered the way in which a browser tab is processed. By introducing the multi-threaded processing concept to a browser tab, this insulation protects your blog posts from any html/ajax hiccups.

As the browser continues to become the development platform for an increasing number of business and mission-critical tasks, a more robust browser inspired by Chrome provides a needed level of trust and stability. While the Chrome team does bug test the brwoser against a large percentage of the trillion+ pages it has stored in its caching system, it has built failure into the system as a feature.

Chrome, even in its earliest open testing, also happens to be pretty darn fast.

3. Has your hard drive crashed? What about your data center?

Hard drives fail, and more often than manufacturers would have you believe.

Blessed (or cursed) with the economies of scale, Google's datacenter architecture is built on cheap servers with a fundamental expectation that the hardware will fail:

"At Google's scale...if you have thousands of PCs, you can expect one (failure) a day"

Google is then able to leverage that redunancy into faster search results by placing server clusters in competition with one another.