> “It was less about the amount they’re charging and more about the fact that they changed the rules,” Mr. Oksavik said. “They could change the rules again at any time.”
Sounds like some businesses have moved to Nextcloud, Zoho and iCloud due to the trust issues created by this sudden change by Google.
Yeah, it's almost always about money. People do not want to pay, it's that simple.
They don't want to admit it, therefore they often come up with varying arguments such as "the changes comes too fast, hassle to change, you promised it would be free forever, etc)...
I think it is more about user expectations, the impression that's given, or switching up. Google is making money off of people, even when what they offer is "free". They do whatever with user's email and data on their servers.
And as a paid service, Google's customer support and reputation is comparatively shoddy, which is partially why various things are given away for free. At least that way they could take market share and then make money off of the data. I expect "must pay for it" Google Workspace to do as poorly as G Suite before it. But, as Google has deep pockets, I think they allow themselves the luxury to keep that division around.
Yep, and it brings up a question all business owners should ask themselves: how will you mitigate the risk of your cloud provider turning hostile against you? This includes locking you out of administrative accounts, jacking prices or changing TOS with little notice, etc.
It'd be nice if I could align my identity to my service provider: gmail for Google, iCloud for Apple; and ... Amazon-mail for Amazon; hulu mail for Hulu? AT&T-mail, ..
For the "big" players it seems it'd be eaay enough for me to use a keychain application synchronized across multiple 3rd-party platforms. This would let me define my "total" identity privately (in my personal keychain) without having to worry about cross-vendor contamination.
The hide-my-email hack from iCloud is not a "real" substitute. A change-in-behavior from Apple would cause issues everywhere else.
This really feels like a place a co-op or a govt agency with incentives aligned to its members could really help...
Alternately, a bit of legislation requiring email-less account generation, or allowing credit card providers to enforce such provisions would work.
> There is no such thing as a never changing service. That is a fantasy in any industry.
There's no such thing as "never", but you can definitely pay enough for a service that the service provider agrees to not change things for a certain period of time. The main risk is that the company might disappear but that's why some businesses choose large established players instead of SMEs.
> There is nothing sudden about asking money for a free service, you must expect to pay for value provided at some point.
For a long time the value users provided to Google was the data. But of course that promotion was more important than the public good-will...
This is interesting actually, I didn't even know there was a free version of the business suite. I've been paying for years and really only use the email feature. Mainly because I don't want the hassle of running a mail server etc.
I think it's fair enough that Google might start charging for the service, and it's not a significant amount for sure, but what is quite startling is the short deadline. That seems excessive but I don't know when the small businesses were notified.
> I think it's fair enough that Google might start charging for the service
The other upside is that it opens up room for competition. Take something like Google Analytics, a terrible product that is ubiquitous primarily because of the name and that its free. The cost of running the service isn't free and no other competitor could reasonably get enough benefits from the data to justify the cost. By giving the service away for free (at a loss?), Google crushes competitors.
Besides I would much rather pay a small price for a product and understand their business model than to let them make money off my data through opaque means.
Google announced that they would start charging back in January and extended the deadline by two months already. IMO this is plenty of time for small businesses that want to save $72/year per employee that needs their own email address. If they need more time they can pay a few bucks -- probably less than an hours wage per employee per month, anyway -- and find an alternative later.
With notice, there doesn’t seem to be much wrong with withdrawing a free service.
Off topic, but I was really frustrated the two times I signed up for a paid account with my custom domain: there was no way to share all of my Google Play movie and book purchases from free GMail to my paid GSuite account. Having two accounts was a nuisance. They probably would have got $10/month from me for the rest of my life if they had fixed that. Google does some things, like GCP, really well and sometimes seems to fall down.
“They’re basically strong-arming us to switch to something paid after they got us hooked on this free service...”
Google's antics come off to many, as just slimy and unnecessary. Not to mention the poor customer support and outrageous privacy violations, particularly if you are not a big enough business and/or paying them enough. Way too many negative stories and interactions. In general, I prefer to stay away from anything Google (and so do a number of people that I know), unless necessary. There are a number of alternatives to choose from, and growing.
I don’t disagree with you. Personally, I like that we have lots of choice in Google, Microsoft, Apple, Alibaba, Meta’s Oculus platform, etc.
I am both for some government privacy over site as well as free market competition. I tend to favor being a customer of small companies when possible, support independent news streaming, etc., but there is lots of choice in the marketplace.
I honestly haven't read the article but the headline makes it sound like yet another NYT one-sided take that big companies are more like governmental functions nowadays and have some kind of esoteric vaguely defined moral obligation towards the society
Come on, $5-10 month per user for ad-free, supposedly scanning free, enterprise-level reliable email is a very very reasonable expense. I’m not even a business, or a Google fan, and I’ve paid to have gmail on my own email for what feels like almost a decade now!
Random aside - advanced protection is one of my favorite Google innovations, I really don’t have to worry about my gmail getting taken over and losing access to primary web identity
In the case of individuals and small businesses who have been using this free tier of service for a long time, it's very easy to just say "come on it's only $6, and think about how long it's been free." Fair enough.
But, my understanding is that many consulting shops (e.g. web designers etc) set their clients up to have their email hosted through this service, thinking it's all their clients would ever need and, well, it's free. They could have hundreds of clients who now need to start paying. If the clients are unsophisticated they may not even know they have the service, to them it's just "Gmail but somehow it's my domain, I dunno, some web guy set it up for me years ago, I think." This could lead to real headaches for the consulting shops and the users. Heck, think about how many of these were probably set up by consultants who were basically fly-by-night (moonlighting, etc) and can't even be contacted anymore by the clients?
I'm not saying that users should feel entitled to free services forever. I am saying that the expectation is not outlandish, considering how many free-for-personal-and-very-small-business use SaaS things are out there, especially with email and chat platforms.
This has been talked about soooo much already, c'mon NYT, this is news from February.
They didn't roll this out smoothly, realizing after the fact some lateral/personal-use options were needed. As a user/customer who this affected in both personal and business sides, I'm happy with the compromise to declare personal etc. But also, c'mon, 14 years of free pretty damn good. Business users stand to pay for some services, esp. the breadth that G offers.
23 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 71.1 ms ] threadSo… it is about the money then? Looks like NYT will run any story these days.
> “It was less about the amount they’re charging and more about the fact that they changed the rules,” Mr. Oksavik said. “They could change the rules again at any time.”
Sounds like some businesses have moved to Nextcloud, Zoho and iCloud due to the trust issues created by this sudden change by Google.
They don't want to admit it, therefore they often come up with varying arguments such as "the changes comes too fast, hassle to change, you promised it would be free forever, etc)...
And as a paid service, Google's customer support and reputation is comparatively shoddy, which is partially why various things are given away for free. At least that way they could take market share and then make money off of the data. I expect "must pay for it" Google Workspace to do as poorly as G Suite before it. But, as Google has deep pockets, I think they allow themselves the luxury to keep that division around.
For the "big" players it seems it'd be eaay enough for me to use a keychain application synchronized across multiple 3rd-party platforms. This would let me define my "total" identity privately (in my personal keychain) without having to worry about cross-vendor contamination.
The hide-my-email hack from iCloud is not a "real" substitute. A change-in-behavior from Apple would cause issues everywhere else.
This really feels like a place a co-op or a govt agency with incentives aligned to its members could really help...
Alternately, a bit of legislation requiring email-less account generation, or allowing credit card providers to enforce such provisions would work.
There is nothing sudden about asking money for a free service, you must expect to pay for value provided at some point.
There's no such thing as "never", but you can definitely pay enough for a service that the service provider agrees to not change things for a certain period of time. The main risk is that the company might disappear but that's why some businesses choose large established players instead of SMEs.
> There is nothing sudden about asking money for a free service, you must expect to pay for value provided at some point.
For a long time the value users provided to Google was the data. But of course that promotion was more important than the public good-will...
That’s exactly the issue here - they weren’t paying anything for the service provided.
> For a long time the value users provided to Google was the data
But Google doesn’t and hasn’t used Workspace data for Ads (1). That would be bad business.
(1) https://workspace.google.com/learn-more/security/security-wh...
I think it's fair enough that Google might start charging for the service, and it's not a significant amount for sure, but what is quite startling is the short deadline. That seems excessive but I don't know when the small businesses were notified.
The other upside is that it opens up room for competition. Take something like Google Analytics, a terrible product that is ubiquitous primarily because of the name and that its free. The cost of running the service isn't free and no other competitor could reasonably get enough benefits from the data to justify the cost. By giving the service away for free (at a loss?), Google crushes competitors.
Besides I would much rather pay a small price for a product and understand their business model than to let them make money off my data through opaque means.
With notice, there doesn’t seem to be much wrong with withdrawing a free service.
Off topic, but I was really frustrated the two times I signed up for a paid account with my custom domain: there was no way to share all of my Google Play movie and book purchases from free GMail to my paid GSuite account. Having two accounts was a nuisance. They probably would have got $10/month from me for the rest of my life if they had fixed that. Google does some things, like GCP, really well and sometimes seems to fall down.
Google's antics come off to many, as just slimy and unnecessary. Not to mention the poor customer support and outrageous privacy violations, particularly if you are not a big enough business and/or paying them enough. Way too many negative stories and interactions. In general, I prefer to stay away from anything Google (and so do a number of people that I know), unless necessary. There are a number of alternatives to choose from, and growing.
I am both for some government privacy over site as well as free market competition. I tend to favor being a customer of small companies when possible, support independent news streaming, etc., but there is lots of choice in the marketplace.
Random aside - advanced protection is one of my favorite Google innovations, I really don’t have to worry about my gmail getting taken over and losing access to primary web identity
But, my understanding is that many consulting shops (e.g. web designers etc) set their clients up to have their email hosted through this service, thinking it's all their clients would ever need and, well, it's free. They could have hundreds of clients who now need to start paying. If the clients are unsophisticated they may not even know they have the service, to them it's just "Gmail but somehow it's my domain, I dunno, some web guy set it up for me years ago, I think." This could lead to real headaches for the consulting shops and the users. Heck, think about how many of these were probably set up by consultants who were basically fly-by-night (moonlighting, etc) and can't even be contacted anymore by the clients?
I'm not saying that users should feel entitled to free services forever. I am saying that the expectation is not outlandish, considering how many free-for-personal-and-very-small-business use SaaS things are out there, especially with email and chat platforms.
They didn't roll this out smoothly, realizing after the fact some lateral/personal-use options were needed. As a user/customer who this affected in both personal and business sides, I'm happy with the compromise to declare personal etc. But also, c'mon, 14 years of free pretty damn good. Business users stand to pay for some services, esp. the breadth that G offers.
5 months ago: Google requiring all ‘G Suite legacy free edition’ users to start paying (660 votes)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29996432
1 month ago: GSuite legacy users can now get a free personal account, includes Gmail (238 votes)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31403047