12 ms·

> In particular, the short notice period (3 months + 2 months grace) for something people have been using for a decade is jarring. For me, this raises the obvi

by Kalium 5y ago

> In particular, the short notice period (3 months + 2 months grace) for something people have been using for a decade is jarring. 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.

300bps 5y ago
How long a notice period is long enough? Looking at it another way, Google's most recent net profit is $18.94 billion per quarter. I have no idea but if there are 1 million G Suite Legacy accounts out there at $60 per year. That would increase their revenue $60 million per year. So just assume all that revenue is net profit which would make their quarterly net profit go from $18.94 billion to $18.955 billion for the low cost of pissing off 1 million people.
- pc86 5y ago
  You never get to the point of making $19 billion a quarter if you aren't constantly looking for ways to optimize pricing and make a little more money. And at the individual level, $60 million is $60 million. What percentage of the bottom line it is is much less relevant than what percentage of your team's top line revenue it is and how it impacts your ability to get a bonus, increase headcount, get a promotion, etc.
  - smilekzs 5y ago
    The PR backlash costs worth way more than what this would have saved.
    - playeren 5y ago
      Their main customer base (by orders of magnitude) are advertisers. I'm not convinced that this move will change anything at all in those relationships. I, myself, am a 'victim' of this, with two personal accounts grandfathered in from the good ol' days. I'm moving both of them to Protonmail.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
chii 5y ago
> 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. which is called entitlement. And i'm seeing more and more of this sense of entitlement as more and more people (esp. young people) being exposed to the internet - and this seeps into their other lives offline.
- sumedh 5y ago
  > which is called entitlement. Or you can call it bait and switch by the company.
- rnk 5y ago
  You do know they make money from you using Google Gmail because they serve ads. And you're probably logged in while you're searching and using other Google services so they know who you are and your history & they can show you better ads. Google actually does make money. If everyone is not logged in when they're using Google, Google will be less able to serve relevant ads and make less money.
- JaimeThompson 5y ago
  Google has shown such "entitlement" on many occasions. Take, for one example, their idea that they are entitled to not pay Sonos for their technology which just came back to bite them. Of course it was Google's customers who ended up getting the short end of the stick.
  - dpark 5y ago
    > their idea that they are entitled to not pay Sonos for their technology Might want to research that one. Sonos “technology” here is the idea that multiple speakers can be adjusted by one knob… but the knob happens to be software.
    - JaimeThompson 5y ago
      It is a bit more than that. https://techstory.in/google-found-to-have-violated-sonos-patents-potentially-blocking-import-of-some-google-devices-into-the-us/ https://techstory.in/google-found-to-have-violated-sonos-pat...
dendriti 5y ago
Who said the notice period should be an entire decade? Or even five years?
- pc86 5y ago
  They're arguing against the (IMO ridiculous) assertion that 5 months is "short notice." Everyone here agrees an hour's notice would be far too short. Everyone here agrees a decade or five years is too long. So where is the line? It doesn't mean anyone suggested it should be any of those lengths.
  - Aloha 5y ago
    It may take me two months just to figure out how to migrate my services someplace else. I'm hosting 10 accounts worth of email.
srg0 5y ago
I'd say that a year or a year + 3 months is a reasonable transition period. People need to assess the situation, evaluate existing solutions (including paying for the service), what needs to be done, etc. They're not doing it as their job, so do not necessarily know the current market offers. Then they need to allocate time and resources to do the transition. Time, when the transition is the least disruptive, and the resources are usually availability if an in-house specialist. I know plenty of companies where upgrading a software take more than a year, with all their budgets, IT departments and external contractors. A typical G Suite user won't have all that expertise readily available. That means that the transition will often require an IT enthusiast working in their free time. It's reasonable to assume that they will have at least one vacation per year to do that. So if the transition is ≥ 12 month, everyone and their mom should be able to do it. If the transition is 3-5 months, I can see how it can be a problem even for commercial users with a dedicated task force.
- prirun 5y ago
  I moved from Gmail to Fastmail recently, because Google Sites forced me to move from V1 to V2. However, in their defense, they gave me over a year's notice to convert my site and I still didn't do it. They made it read-only after a year, which is what pushed me into trying the migration. It was a disaster: the Google V2 site was slow (my release notes page took 15 seconds to load but used to load in a couple seconds) and the site looked like crap. So I had to do Takeout and hand-edit Google's 512KB-per-page of Javascript and HTML. But now, pages average 19KB each, the site looks great, and it's way easier to manage with Asciidoc instead of using a browser editing window. My point: it doesn't matter how long they give us to switch - most people won't do it until they are absolutely forced. This reminds me of Microsoft back in the day. Windows was (is?) crap, unreliable, and without the kindness of technical friends and relatives willing to work on someone's Windows issues for free, Microsoft may not have ever made it past DOS. I got sick of working on everyone's Windows problems so got rid of all my Windows machines and just told people "sorry, I don't have any Windows machines anymore and can't help you". And it was the truth - after about a year I really didn't know how to help them anymore! It's great! Maybe it's time for technical people to stop working for free for Microsoft and Google. If their stuff is crap, let them sort it out with their wonderful customer service that you now have to pay for.
Aloha 5y ago
A reasonable standard is one month for every year of use, especially for those of us who are not businesses. It's not 60 bucks a year for most of us, it's whatever the domain costs plus $6 per account times the number of accounts. In my case it's 720 dollars a year, which is more than it is worth.
olivierduval 5y ago
Actually, I think that the "right move" should be quite different: DONT STOP a service with a short deadline but DEGRADATE it with a long deadline. If you STOP a service (or turn it to a PAID service) on short notice - and a service that is essential to people - then people will have to rush to find a solution... and will feel been extorted. If you DEGRADATE the service more and more, people will slowly leave or upgrade to PAID, but they will have the choice. Moreover, email is really a sensitive matter: it's a main point of contact for... well... email... but altogether for online service (IRS, website account, etc.) and in a way our digital life. So you can't just leave such a short notice. However, you have to let your FREE customer know that they have a choice to make quickly... so DEGRADATION is a good tradeoff I think
- syshum 5y ago
  They have been trying that for awhile, legacy accounts have not been getting some of the new feature, space was more limited on the legacy accounts than the paid accounts, and a few other things. Most of us however we perfectly fine with the limited on the accounts... in reality if they just gave me the exact same level of service as they do the free gmail but with a custom domain I would be fine / happy. That is after all what the original service I signed up for was in the beginning. I have no interest in Google Workspace, I want Gmail, Drive, and Identity. That is it. Maybe Photos... All of which they offer free to everyone still today just not with a custom domain
  - lewisl9029 5y ago
    Same here. I honestly don't need the custom domain email stuff (I can move that to another provider). Just give me an option to turn my account into a regular @gmail.com account with working email/calendar/meet like everybody else paying $0, and I'll be happy. I'm just not a fan of being left with a crippled account even compared to their free service if I want to keep my existing stuff outside of email.
    - bullines 5y ago
      I'm thinking of doing something similar, basically: 1. cancelling my Legacy Free Edition 2. moving my domain to another provider (e.g. Proton Mail, Fastmail, etc.) 3. creating a personal Gmail account using one of the email address that will be formerly part of my Legacy Free Edition I have some hesitance that the Google account creation flow won't allow me to do this.

by Kalium 5y ago

300bps 5y ago

How long a notice period is long enough? Looking at it another way, Google's most recent net profit is $18.94 billion per quarter. I have no idea but if there are 1 million G Suite Legacy accounts out there at $60 per year. That would increase their revenue $60 million per year. So just assume all that revenue is net profit which would make their quarterly net profit go from $18.94 billion to $18.955 billion for the low cost of pissing off 1 million people.

pc86 5y ago
You never get to the point of making $19 billion a quarter if you aren't constantly looking for ways to optimize pricing and make a little more money. And at the individual level, $60 million is $60 million. What percentage of the bottom line it is is much less relevant than what percentage of your team's top line revenue it is and how it impacts your ability to get a bonus, increase headcount, get a promotion, etc.
- smilekzs 5y ago
  The PR backlash costs worth way more than what this would have saved.
  - playeren 5y ago
    Their main customer base (by orders of magnitude) are advertisers. I'm not convinced that this move will change anything at all in those relationships. I, myself, am a 'victim' of this, with two personal accounts grandfathered in from the good ol' days. I'm moving both of them to Protonmail.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

chii 5y ago

> 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. which is called entitlement. And i'm seeing more and more of this sense of entitlement as more and more people (esp. young people) being exposed to the internet - and this seeps into their other lives offline.

sumedh 5y ago
> which is called entitlement. Or you can call it bait and switch by the company.
rnk 5y ago
You do know they make money from you using Google Gmail because they serve ads. And you're probably logged in while you're searching and using other Google services so they know who you are and your history & they can show you better ads. Google actually does make money. If everyone is not logged in when they're using Google, Google will be less able to serve relevant ads and make less money.
JaimeThompson 5y ago
Google has shown such "entitlement" on many occasions. Take, for one example, their idea that they are entitled to not pay Sonos for their technology which just came back to bite them. Of course it was Google's customers who ended up getting the short end of the stick.
- dpark 5y ago
  > their idea that they are entitled to not pay Sonos for their technology Might want to research that one. Sonos “technology” here is the idea that multiple speakers can be adjusted by one knob… but the knob happens to be software.
  - JaimeThompson 5y ago
    It is a bit more than that. https://techstory.in/google-found-to-have-violated-sonos-patents-potentially-blocking-import-of-some-google-devices-into-the-us/ https://techstory.in/google-found-to-have-violated-sonos-pat...

dendriti 5y ago

Who said the notice period should be an entire decade? Or even five years?

pc86 5y ago
They're arguing against the (IMO ridiculous) assertion that 5 months is "short notice." Everyone here agrees an hour's notice would be far too short. Everyone here agrees a decade or five years is too long. So where is the line? It doesn't mean anyone suggested it should be any of those lengths.
- Aloha 5y ago
  It may take me two months just to figure out how to migrate my services someplace else. I'm hosting 10 accounts worth of email.

srg0 5y ago

I'd say that a year or a year + 3 months is a reasonable transition period. People need to assess the situation, evaluate existing solutions (including paying for the service), what needs to be done, etc. They're not doing it as their job, so do not necessarily know the current market offers. Then they need to allocate time and resources to do the transition. Time, when the transition is the least disruptive, and the resources are usually availability if an in-house specialist. I know plenty of companies where upgrading a software take more than a year, with all their budgets, IT departments and external contractors. A typical G Suite user won't have all that expertise readily available. That means that the transition will often require an IT enthusiast working in their free time. It's reasonable to assume that they will have at least one vacation per year to do that. So if the transition is ≥ 12 month, everyone and their mom should be able to do it. If the transition is 3-5 months, I can see how it can be a problem even for commercial users with a dedicated task force.

prirun 5y ago
I moved from Gmail to Fastmail recently, because Google Sites forced me to move from V1 to V2. However, in their defense, they gave me over a year's notice to convert my site and I still didn't do it. They made it read-only after a year, which is what pushed me into trying the migration. It was a disaster: the Google V2 site was slow (my release notes page took 15 seconds to load but used to load in a couple seconds) and the site looked like crap. So I had to do Takeout and hand-edit Google's 512KB-per-page of Javascript and HTML. But now, pages average 19KB each, the site looks great, and it's way easier to manage with Asciidoc instead of using a browser editing window. My point: it doesn't matter how long they give us to switch - most people won't do it until they are absolutely forced. This reminds me of Microsoft back in the day. Windows was (is?) crap, unreliable, and without the kindness of technical friends and relatives willing to work on someone's Windows issues for free, Microsoft may not have ever made it past DOS. I got sick of working on everyone's Windows problems so got rid of all my Windows machines and just told people "sorry, I don't have any Windows machines anymore and can't help you". And it was the truth - after about a year I really didn't know how to help them anymore! It's great! Maybe it's time for technical people to stop working for free for Microsoft and Google. If their stuff is crap, let them sort it out with their wonderful customer service that you now have to pay for.

Aloha 5y ago

A reasonable standard is one month for every year of use, especially for those of us who are not businesses. It's not 60 bucks a year for most of us, it's whatever the domain costs plus $6 per account times the number of accounts. In my case it's 720 dollars a year, which is more than it is worth.

olivierduval 5y ago

Actually, I think that the "right move" should be quite different: DONT STOP a service with a short deadline but DEGRADATE it with a long deadline. If you STOP a service (or turn it to a PAID service) on short notice - and a service that is essential to people - then people will have to rush to find a solution... and will feel been extorted. If you DEGRADATE the service more and more, people will slowly leave or upgrade to PAID, but they will have the choice. Moreover, email is really a sensitive matter: it's a main point of contact for... well... email... but altogether for online service (IRS, website account, etc.) and in a way our digital life. So you can't just leave such a short notice. However, you have to let your FREE customer know that they have a choice to make quickly... so DEGRADATION is a good tradeoff I think

syshum 5y ago
They have been trying that for awhile, legacy accounts have not been getting some of the new feature, space was more limited on the legacy accounts than the paid accounts, and a few other things. Most of us however we perfectly fine with the limited on the accounts... in reality if they just gave me the exact same level of service as they do the free gmail but with a custom domain I would be fine / happy. That is after all what the original service I signed up for was in the beginning. I have no interest in Google Workspace, I want Gmail, Drive, and Identity. That is it. Maybe Photos... All of which they offer free to everyone still today just not with a custom domain
- lewisl9029 5y ago
  Same here. I honestly don't need the custom domain email stuff (I can move that to another provider). Just give me an option to turn my account into a regular @gmail.com account with working email/calendar/meet like everybody else paying $0, and I'll be happy. I'm just not a fan of being left with a crippled account even compared to their free service if I want to keep my existing stuff outside of email.
  - bullines 5y ago
    I'm thinking of doing something similar, basically: 1. cancelling my Legacy Free Edition 2. moving my domain to another provider (e.g. Proton Mail, Fastmail, etc.) 3. creating a personal Gmail account using one of the email address that will be formerly part of my Legacy Free Edition I have some hesitance that the Google account creation flow won't allow me to do this.