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My advice is to never, ever, ever rely on Google Workspace for a startup. Office 365 is a little bit less usable, but Microsoft can work with businesses. I use

My advice is to never, ever, ever rely on Google Workspace for a startup. Office 365 is a little bit less usable, but Microsoft can work with businesses. I used Google Workspace for a startup. Startup went idle for a while. Google sent a message to me warning the account would be terminated unless I logged in on some short timeline. GMail filed its own email as spam. Boom. Everything from that startup was gone. I used Google Workspace for my family domain. Google decided to discontinue GSuite/Free. Now, I'm SOL. I've had similar experiences with Youtube. I build a major startup with Google as a partner. Videos were on Youtube. Google had 4 engineers assigned to us. Youtube has a bug which took us down. There was no way to resolve the bug, even with a team supporting us (in a different part of Google). We had to migrate off. I've more recently been involved in businesses integrating with Workspace. On the API side, Google suddenly required a security audit for our business integrations to keep working. That's tens of thousands of dollars. Many small businesses went under when Google introduced this. (https://www.prescientsecurity.com/google-oauth-api-verification https://www.prescientsecurity.com/google-oauth-api-verificat...) We also had an extension, which is in the process of breaking with Manifest V3 (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-manifest-v3-deceitful-and-threatening https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-ma...). Again, many Google partners are going out-of-business over this. Each time I've done business with Google, I've eventually been !@#$%. These are all true stories, but they're not all the true stories I have. I have a much longer collection of stories of being !@#$% by Google. Some I can't talk about have to do with Workspace security issues. BOY was that a rabbit hole. If I could talk about it, you'd never do business with Google either. Google has excellent security for their data, but not for your data. Google doesn't mind killing your livelihood with random changes like these. It happens over, and over, and over. Everyone thinks it won't happen to them, until it does.

invalidname 5y ago
Yep. You can't count on Google to be anything other than an advertising company and even then it's a pretty bad one at that e.g. https://talktotheduck.dev/production-horrors-handling-disasters-public-debrief https://talktotheduck.dev/production-horrors-handling-disast... Even search which used to be its crowning achievement isn't great for most terms. SEO dominates google completely.
staticassertion 5y ago
As a Gsuite customer, I do mostly agree. I'll say I'm very pleased with GSuite, but I also think that Google is about as bad as it gets with regards to customer service, and I would never put customer data into Google Cloud since I would never risk losing that data due to their idiotic, inane systems deciding to ban me, and no support channel for getting it back.
jrm4 5y ago
If your business relies on it, whatever "it" is, then you probably need to pay for it, so that if it has some serious problem, you can call up a human and either beg or yell at them to fix it, depending on the situation. I've always thought it madness to even rely on gmail for a business, who can cancel you whenever.
- blip54321 5y ago
  The problem is if you pay Google for "it," you're still treated as a statistic, same as the non-paying customers. It's deep in the corporate DNA. Google Workspace isn't free, and neither is the rest of GCP. I've had multi-million dollar engagements with Google, and you're just as vulnerable to this stuff as the free ones. I've had things escalated through one of Eric Schmidt's direct reports, and I was still vulnerable. And as a footnote, I do subscribe to Google One on my soon-to-be-terminated Workspace account. I'm not sure why Google is terminating a service I paid for. If you pay Google, you can talk to human beings, perhaps, but they're no more empowered to solve your problem than their web pages. Microsoft and Amazon have always provided real support. Things get escalated to engineers who fix things if need be. Things also don't get whack-a-moled for no reason; they're aware that bankrupting my business isn't good for their business, even if the short-term ROI on sustaining a legacy API or something is negative.
  - jrm4 5y ago
    Oh right. I suppose "paying for it" is necessary, not sufficient. I wouldn't know; I've paid a much smaller company for all my services and such, though they're not super office-y; but website and email related things.

invalidname 5y ago

Yep. You can't count on Google to be anything other than an advertising company and even then it's a pretty bad one at that e.g. https://talktotheduck.dev/production-horrors-handling-disasters-public-debrief https://talktotheduck.dev/production-horrors-handling-disast... Even search which used to be its crowning achievement isn't great for most terms. SEO dominates google completely.

staticassertion 5y ago

As a Gsuite customer, I do mostly agree. I'll say I'm very pleased with GSuite, but I also think that Google is about as bad as it gets with regards to customer service, and I would never put customer data into Google Cloud since I would never risk losing that data due to their idiotic, inane systems deciding to ban me, and no support channel for getting it back.

jrm4 5y ago

If your business relies on it, whatever "it" is, then you probably need to pay for it, so that if it has some serious problem, you can call up a human and either beg or yell at them to fix it, depending on the situation. I've always thought it madness to even rely on gmail for a business, who can cancel you whenever.

blip54321 5y ago
The problem is if you pay Google for "it," you're still treated as a statistic, same as the non-paying customers. It's deep in the corporate DNA. Google Workspace isn't free, and neither is the rest of GCP. I've had multi-million dollar engagements with Google, and you're just as vulnerable to this stuff as the free ones. I've had things escalated through one of Eric Schmidt's direct reports, and I was still vulnerable. And as a footnote, I do subscribe to Google One on my soon-to-be-terminated Workspace account. I'm not sure why Google is terminating a service I paid for. If you pay Google, you can talk to human beings, perhaps, but they're no more empowered to solve your problem than their web pages. Microsoft and Amazon have always provided real support. Things get escalated to engineers who fix things if need be. Things also don't get whack-a-moled for no reason; they're aware that bankrupting my business isn't good for their business, even if the short-term ROI on sustaining a legacy API or something is negative.
- jrm4 5y ago
  Oh right. I suppose "paying for it" is necessary, not sufficient. I wouldn't know; I've paid a much smaller company for all my services and such, though they're not super office-y; but website and email related things.