End of the road for biz living off free G Suite legacy edition After offering free G Suite apps for more than a decade, Google next week plans to discontinue its legacy service – which hasn't been offered to new customers since 2012 – and force business users to transition to a paid subscription for the service's successor, Google Workspace. "For businesses, the G Suite legacy free …
Yeah, it's a bit inside out. But in reality, the offered Gmail for free to kill all of the other email providers, they created G suite to undercut one of M$'s biggest cash cows (office, retribution for them launching Bing and cutting into ads), and drive smother Dropbox's ambitions of moving peoples files out of Googles panopticon.
The real blow here is it cut the throat of almost every decent domain level email host, and all funding for a real Office replacement evaporated when docs and sheets rode into town. iWork is a permanent also ran(with the exception of Keynote, IMHO better than the "original" powerpoint) and funding for openoffice, or a market to sustain anything else, dried up.
I think those usually have to be very close if not simultaneous (I.E. you get the switch before you ever get the bait or you get the bait for a short time before it's taken away). Having it for over a decade before that happens is a little different, don't you think. At that point, it's a service that's being discontinued, not bait.
What did people expect? I've been trying (albeit not completely successfully) to de-googlify my life for some time, and to do that (surprise surprise) I have to pay other people money to give me similar services. Evidently, Google couldn't turn these people into enough of a product to make it worth their while.
$256 billion isn't enough to offer a free service ?
I think that's called greed, pure and simple.
No shit the company had free tools that anyone and the mother if they have the time and effort could learn to be successful this is a joke this should is the nail in the coffin if I have no way to use g site and use g doc and the the other free tools then why am I here
I believe in open source this is showing me they don't care about people or effort they care about money
Idk what I expected I thought that Google gave a shit about people and this effort was all ways what I showed them my free great g site my ability to do everything you need to for free
Whatever worlds changing looks like I'm dropping Google and LaMDA I'm sorry
Yes, it's greed, but that's how people and companies work. They could take the money they already have and give you stuff with it, but that's not very likely. Similarly, you could cash out some of your savings and buy me things that I don't need, but that's also unlikely. They want to make more money, and they're going to sell their services to make that happen.
"Free services simply can't be counted on, as demonstrated by Google's discontinuation of unlimited cloud storage for Google Workspace for Education customers, which takes effect in July."
Oh yes they can. Just download LibreOffice or one of the other FOSS alternatives
OK, not strictly speaking a service but that's for the better. As Google have illustrated numerous times, a service can be turned off; an unencumbered executable, running on your own hardware, can't.
Seems like almost everyone wants to bill per mailbox these days, and the economics just don't make sense when you have a bunch of low traffic mailboxes. Seems like domain "*" boxes are an endangered species. I'm happy to pay a fair rate for storage, but a email account is a line in a config file. Not interested it paying $$ for each mailbox, then $$ more for spam filtering like Postini(again, per mailbox). Especially as I enjoyed spinning up dedicated accounts for garbage like printer alerts at old clients. Nice to be able to just un-map the address instead of filtering the crap out if the client stops paying their bills and never updates any of the forwards.
Anyone operating at any kind of scale should be able to make money of me and still host low traffic domain like mine, 100 mailboxes doesn't add 100x their hosting costs, just a few bytes in a config file. In reality the total mail for my whole domain can fit in either of my free email addresses mailboxes, and my one paid mailbox is "unlimited" (meaning in reality about 2TB tops) which is more email than I have ever sent or received in my lifetime, across all my accounts and domains. I don't need more storage. I just need to be able manage my own addresses.
I currently have to store my personal email overseas just because I couldn't find a reasonable host here state side.
-> Oh yes they can. Just download LibreOffice or one of the other FOSS alternatives
Factor in the cost of storage, if you store even one byte of data. Factor in some kind of access, if you want to access it away from wherever. Factor in some kind of security.
Sum total: not free.
-> Small business owners who have relied on the G Suite legacy free edition aren't thrilled that they will have to pay for Workspace or migrate to a rival like Microsoft
Do these same small businesses offer their goods for free for eons? I don't mean giving something away once in a while, I mean a service they provide for free for years on end? You get what you pay for.
Ive been using a free G Suite legacy account for a small business with less than 20 employees for 10+ years and this coaxed me into taking another look at Office 365 which Id ignored for the last 5 years due to it being a slow, unresponsive mess when I last looked at it. I was pleasantly surprised to find it was much improved and the browser apps are streets ahead of Googles offerings in terms of functionality and usability. Its still isnt quite as responsive as Google Apps, especially when it comes to Outlook vs Gmail in the browser but its good enough. It offers more and better features and at the basic end its almost half the cost. I just wish they had some decent migration tools, it ended up being a manual weekend slog with a lot of G Documents needing manual conversion and tweaking. Even our preferred Linux email clients (Evolution & Geary) work great with it and it integrates into our local Nextcloud instance quite well
Literally draws a picture of a window, that looks like a window, has window controls, but cant act like an actual window, because it's really just a picture of a window. Idiotic. Have you ever tried to explain that to someone?
The folder navigation on the sidebar hides half the stuff on screen, even when it will fit, but until recently you couldn't remove garbage like the automated Categories section. Technically you still can't, but you can hide it at least.
Outlook's web interface gets worse every year too, but that doesn't make Gmail good. There are mistakes there that community college students would be embarrassed by. And you have to open a suspicious message to perform basic actions on it like reporting it as phishing/dangerous, or to view the email source or forward it(as a regular forward strips the email headers).
The argument that is "still better then everyone" else only holds if you count the fact they put most of the email client competition out of business by giving Gmail away for free until even most of the FOSS projects tapped out. No one can scrape together enough cash to keep a roof over their head long enough to professionally code a real email client when Google is giving away free hosted mail.
Fixing the price at zero is still price fixing. Worse, it also means that the best they will ever offer is just barely good enough. There is no interest in real improvements, as Google already has what it needed. That is how a "Free" monopoly kills competition.
That is a bit cheeky. Whilst I've no doubt that their right to do this was buried in the small print of the Ts&Cs that nobody reads in full, to automatically transfer people over from a service that was heavily promoted as "being free" to being billed is bad faith exemplified.
I'm thinking of putting some new Ts&Cs on my website. That whilst access for the Google web crawler may have been free in the past, I reserve the right to start charging them a subscription in the future. Their fault if they don't read them properly and get hit by a bill.
Hopefully this will now fully disable Workspaces on my personal account, which has wrecked the functionality on Google Assistant and Google Home, e.g. I can't set routines on my devices at home.
Been banging my head to disable it but not been able to re-establish those services for <reasons>.
Very frustrating. I like to think of it as a loyalty penalty.
I've been using the Google sites and Google garage and helping people learn to use and take advantage of the free resources this is just another reason we need Lennox mobile if Google is no longer actively helping and providing free resources it's time to drop alphabet completely .... We will see how it plays out in the end
The issue is not the move from free to chargeable - I think the consensus on the forums was that this had been a good thing for a while but no one was surprised they reneged on their original stated promise (free forever - or rather the price is mining your data...) but the issue was the cost proposed was pretty significant, especially for non-commercial usage. I forget the exact numbers but with a family bigger than 3-4 people involved it was ending up significantly more than a similar O365 package. Also worth noting that I suspect the majority of affected users are really just Gmail users with a vanity domain, they're not taking advantage of whatever wonderful features the wider Workspace suite provides.
For me the sting was the loss of licenses if I didn't enroll in the subscription - I bought a lot of streaming video and TV when the kids were small and was not excited at an ultimatum to 'pay a monthly fee or lose the licenses forever'. (I have apps and music, though I've mostly repurchased those for family library.) I really don't mind switching everything else, I self-hosted everything for 15 years and don't mind doing it again if I can't find anything I want to buy.
With 7 family users, $42/month is a lot just to keep access to some old Disney movies. I assume eventually the service will go away for real and I'll just have to rebuy anything I still want. I just wish Google offered a license migration so we could get out without having to spend extra money (and that probably with vudu at this point).
First of all, in my experience Google's products are never all that good, always lack some feature that I need, and often are a struggle to use efficiently. YMMV, but I find them more annoying than anything.
Second, nothing, and I mean NOTHING is free from company like Google or Microsoft. Whether they are charging you directly, or selling you as the product to an outside buyer, you're paying for it. (Obvious exception is all of the truly excellent FOSS software that you can get for free.) And honestly this has happened again, and again, and again with these companies, getting people hooked and then demanding cash to continue.
Over the last few years I've moved everything computing away from the major corporations like Microsoft and Google. I host my sites on my own domains, at a company where I can actually phone up a real person if problems arise. I own my domain names. I control my own e-mail. I use Linux on my computer, and FOSS for everything possible. No big ugly surprises, and no sudden bills arriving without warning.
I mean honestly I am quite prepared to pay for services where needed, and sometimes just because it feels like the right thing to do. I understand that when you pay you can expect a better level of service and support. The problem is that companies like Google and Microsoft don't offer any real support to average customers. They'll take your money and run, but that's it.
Postscript #1: I would happily pay Twitter if it would eliminate the idiotic ads and "Promoted" tweets, but they won't sell me that option.
Postscript #2: In a rush situation made the mistake of setting up a quick web site at Wix.com. Which apparently can't even be exported to escape them! A great reminder why I should stick to my own rules about staying far away from commercial operators!
Yeah, I feel like the "Googly-ness" of the Gsuite is second only to the "Appley-ness" in terms of rage at terrible design choices and brokenness.
I work at an 85% Apple shop, and we use Gmail. FML. There is no escape for me.
As for the economics of paid support, it's not horrible if you have a single mailbox for a vanity domain, but if you are a SMB, you could buy a pretty beefy box for the money they are asking for. And you will still wind up paying for office licenses for a decent chunk of your users, and probably Adobe too, as PDF will never die, and people insist on wanting to EDIT THEM after they are exported.
This is why I leave IT about every 10 years and go back to engineering. Then I get sick of crunch time and miss talking to people and come back. Maybe it's time to just open up a pizza joint.
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