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0 pointsaingisni_del4y ago0 comments

Do you really think they care about that reputation? It's simply binary: Product makes money, product does not make money. Did you think Google was giving away free stuff for "the community"?

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4 comments · 3 top-level

evilduck4y ago· 1 in thread

Loss leaders are a thing. I've had a free GSuite account on my personal domain which effectively acted as free job training and contributed to choosing them as an email provider for two companies I've worked for and clearly contributed to vastly more revenue than it would cost to host my personal GSuite account for my next 10 lifetimes. Over the last decade I've slowly but surely stopped recommending Google for anything they offer. It's been a slow attrition but I've wound up at zero.

They've very effectively taken a good chunk of their best evangelists and turned them into detractors. I have no idea if they've done the math and decided that was worth it, but I sure hope they have and it's not just total incompetence from one of the biggest players in the industry.

daveloyall4y ago

Exactly. As an early adopter, I brought who knows how many souls to gmail. I set up a couple small companies on Google Apps, or whatever they want to call it this year. (Mine is called GAFYD...)

When Google gave me a free HTC Magic handset in San Francisco, I showed it to everyone. I performed tricks with it. I made people want one.

To this day, three members of my immediate family use newer models of my old Pixel phone.

I told a man with a lot of CPU heavy jobs that GCE exists.

I'm talking about "influence" a lot.. but let's be clear, that's not all.

Google knows me--or at least it had the opportunity to. Somewhere between all those referrals and the emails in my mbox files at gmail and GAFYD which pre-date the launch of those services by a decade or my bug reports, or working in one of their datacenters for a while, they should know that I helped them be what they are today.

Maybe they do. Maybe this kind of treatment is what I deserve.

(to reiterate what others have posted, it isn't about the money. It's about the major unplanned migration. Which they still have not notified me about.)

SteveNuts4y ago

I'm not necessarily just talking about this particular instance, just in general that's definitely been the overall theme of the discussion when things like this happen. We're a paying G-suite customer so we're not affected, but we HAVE been affected by features that users adopt as part of their workflow and productivity that Google decides to axe on a whim.

It makes us as an IT organization look stupid when our users come asking us where the feature they rely on went. I just want to know if leadership at Google has any inkling that this is their reputation or not.

throwoutway4y ago

Haha! Just yesterday, that is exactly what Google was promoting as their first defense against antitrust regulation. That “these free services provide thousands of dollars a year in value to the average American”.

So if they’re going to kill the free stuff, then they have no ground to stand on.

https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/public-policy/the-h...

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