I'm all about Google being evil and all that, but spending valuable aggression on this seems a bit excessive..
The Google Takeout system gives you all of your email in a format you might be able to import into another system?
It’s easy to paint customers as frightful moaners, but that’s a surefire way to lose customers, or at least alienate them. Google’s Reader debacle comes to mind.
In particular, the short notice period (3 months + 2 months grace) for something people have been using for a decade is jarring.
And these were the earliest customers of Google Apps for your Domain, and created a lot of positive word of mouth publicity for Google.
Ultimately, it’s not about right and wrong, it’s about how you make customers feel, and Google institutionally doesn’t know how to make ordinary customers feel great when things go wrong. It’s an institutional issue. (Exception: if you’ve got enterprise support for GCP. Then you get a lot of engagement.)
By the same token, people have been using free Gmail accounts for a while now. What do you think the perception will be if Google asked them to pony up $60 a year with 5 months’ notice?
For me, this raises the obvious question. How long a notice period is long enough? Six months? Eight? A year? Five years? A decade?
I think we can all agree that a decade would be an excessive and unreasonable expectation.
> By the same token, people have been using free Gmail accounts for a while now. What do you think the perception will be if Google asked them to pony up $60 a year with 5 months’ notice?
Probably about the same as if Google asked them to pony up $60 a year with a year's notice. Which is to say incredibly hostile because people have come to view free Gmail accounts as a basic public service for which no payment will ever be required under any circumstances.
Now, they are asking for more money (It was $6/mo; it's now $12/mo) for less features that apply to us (can't use YouTube Premium or Google Homes on a family plan if you have G-suite, can't port a Voice number from a consumer account into a G-Suite account, amongst other limitations) because Google decided to convert this offering into their business collaboration portfolio instead of leaving it as its own thing.
Worse, if you want to move all of your email, photos, Google Maps activity, etc. to a free account, well, too bad! You can't! You can use takeout.google.com to download everything, but most of that data can't be imported into consumer.
Basically, we were duped, and now our data is trapped.
Personally, I would be happy if Google offered a way to convert legacy accounts into Google Consumer accounts like flipping a switch. Shit, I'd even pay a few bucks/month still for exactly this experience without all of the Google Workspace-y stuff that I never use. (I never use Google Chat, Google Meet, or any of their business-only offerings _because I never wanted those things in the first place!_)
> What do you think the perception will be if Google asked them to pony up $60 a year [for Gmail] with 5 months’ notice?
Realistically, I and a lot of other people would think "remind me in 4 months and ~25 days so I can put my credit card in." But it's also not a valid comparison because in Gmail you're the product via advertising. Not the case for Apps.
Years later and I still don't use Google (except for search and sometimes maps) because of Reader.
It's basically blackmail: pay the new monthly fee which you didn't agree to when you signed up, or lose access to everything you've already paid for.
I'd be happy to convert accounts to personal Gmail accounts and do mail forwarding. I'd be happy to move to a family plan for $100/year.
After being a user for a decade, you'd think Google would provide me a reasonable way to pay them for their services. But I can't swing $500/year for email.
I use Protonmail for myself and around 5 others, with close to 10 mailboxes. I highly recommend it. Not sure what's available from them re. importing older mailboxes - I've never done it - but everything I've used jas been fantastic.
Protonmail's cheap too. Less than $50 annually for all that I use, including multi-user VPN.
I've heard good things about Fastmail too, of you're looking for an alternative.
People always complain about bait and switch tactics.
Give them a way to revert to a free personal account without losing access to their files, data, and any digital goods they may have purchased and let them decide if they want to covert to a paid account or not.
Imagine nothing changes, but now your wife demands you pay her cost of cup of coffee every time you have sex. Does that eff you up a little bit or do you barely notice?
It’s typical in SaaS to grandfather in old accounts. You take the hit because your later client base is so much bigger, and why not keep your early adopters sweet. Google has calculated the value of those early adopters and decided it’s worth it. Wait until customers have too much to lose and then yank the fishing line. “You call them early adopters? We call them freeloaders.”
This is why I use an iPhone. I pay the money and I get to keep (mostly) my data. Google, you give away your data and pay nothing. Now you give data and you pay? Ick. If Apple starts giving away my data I’d be equally pissed.
But the biggest issue for me right now is the club I run, which has nearly 30 accounts on our Google Workspace domain. The only reason I did this, way back when, was because of the promise of "free forever."
While we have about 30 people on Google Workspace, we have another 70 or so "non-staff" members. Our entire group of about 100 fundraises for our website costs every year, which are considerable for an all-volunteer group ($2000-ish) because we have a pretty resource intensive MediaWiki installation, and other resources.
We've spent 10 years integrating with Google. All of our other resources use Google login. Our group has dozens of Google Groups used for sub-committees. We use Google Drive/Docs excessively. And so on.
But there's no way we can afford to DOUBLE our costs just for Google Workspace. And we can't get a non-profit discount because we're not a charitable organization – we're just a club of writers.
So for us, this is a huge nuisance because not only is Google breaking the agreement it made with us ("FREE FOREVER"), but I don't have the time or resources to manage this kind of transition to something else. And... what, even? If we had known from the beginning they'd break their promise of being free forever, I just wouldn't have built so much infrastructure on top of this system.
A lot of people are talking about entitlement and saying how people shouldn't complain when free stuff goes away. I think those people are missing the point. Google is an incredibly profitable company and it would cost them almost nothing to continue to offer this service. By choosing not to, they piss people off (rightly or wrongly) and won't make much of anything in return. We can speculate about how they got to a place where maintaining this service was painful enough to justify doing that, but from the outside it seems like a poor decision that is hostile to users and antithetical to how they used to do things. That plays into the narrative that this ain't your mamma's google any more and something cool about the 2000s spirit has passed away.
[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/import-gmail-to-o...
If they had instead marketed it as 'free for a decade and then you'll pay some arbitrary amount' what do you think the adoption would have been?
Google: "Come enjoy this limited version of our service, it's absolutely free!"
Consumer: "Excellent. I was going to go with this other service, but since this one is free I will take advantage of it!"
Years later...
Google: "Ok, now that you have many years of data in our system, it's time for you to start paying!"
Consumer: "Wait... what?"
Yes, it's been free. But Google offered it for free and now people have years of data in it. Data which could have been in another service had Google not offered this one for free to begin with. It's kind of like a bait and switch. Get people in, get them to sink most of their life into it, and then start charging.
Also, it's not like a lot of people were out looking for this kind of solution. The fact that it was free brought in a LOT of people who otherwise wouldn't have done it, and are now tied down to it.
That's why a lot of people are mad, and to me it is justifiable.
Edit: I'm in Brazil BTW.
