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Gmail is free. People still pay for hosted email. If you get locked out of gmail or they lose all your email, who are you going to call? Would you host mission

by bk 18y ago

Gmail is free. People still pay for hosted email. If you get locked out of gmail or they lose all your email, who are you going to call? Would you host mission critical email that millions of dollars hinge on on gmail? Even if that's addressed, in a huge market, a tiny market share can still be huge. Opera has somewhere around 1% (non-mobile) browser market share, and they still have millions of customers. If there are 10M voice services customers, 1% is 100k. If you can charge $10-30 per customer per month (https://apps.simulscribe.com/signup/register https://apps.simulscribe.com/signup/register), you've still got a $12-36M/year business. For VCs this may be a zombie, but it's still a great small business (a la 37signals).

aditya 18y ago
BTW: Gmail for the enterprise comes with 24/7 customer support: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/details.html#b7 http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/details.html#b7
- seekely 18y ago
  From my experience, Google's customer support for it's paid Google Apps could use a ton of improvement,to the point where I think it is a significant weakness exploitable by companies with similar paid services and better support. They are really difficult to contact and their support navigation always frustratingly leads you to one of their help pages instead of a number or email address to use. And if the problem is not a service outage/emergency, you must go through email which takes days to get the typical generic and unhelpful response. I love all of Google's services, but I am/was incredibly frustrated that we actually paid to use their services and then they left us out in the cold when it came to a shortcoming of their infrastructure. We started with a domain for Google Apps and purchased 6 accounts on the domain. A year or so into using their service, we realized we needed to switch our primary domain from ourhabit.com to habitindustries.com. Both the domains are owned by us, and habitindustries.com was at the time setup as an alias on our ourhabit.com domain. Turns out, Google Apps does not support the switch. And not only do they not support it, there is no migration help to move emails or remove the risk of losing email while you transfer over to the new primary domain. And the real kicker? They made us pay for all 6 accounts again on the new primary domain even though we would no longer would be using the old account. If you aren't going to support a basic feature (which is called for again and again and again on their forums), don't make us shell out another $50 per user to mitigate it. Thank god we only had 6 users at the time. Sorry for the rant, but seeing the claim of 24/7 customer support really set me off :)
  - aditya 18y ago
    whoa -- good to know, I was merely pointing it out since I know they do claim to have 24/7 support, if it's useless then my point is invalid!
- skmurphy 18y ago
  Where is the number to call when it's down? Not down for everyone--that's a different problem--down for you: say if you get "locked out."

by bk 18y ago

aditya 18y ago

BTW: Gmail for the enterprise comes with 24/7 customer support: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/details.html#b7 http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/details.html#b7

seekely 18y ago
From my experience, Google's customer support for it's paid Google Apps could use a ton of improvement,to the point where I think it is a significant weakness exploitable by companies with similar paid services and better support. They are really difficult to contact and their support navigation always frustratingly leads you to one of their help pages instead of a number or email address to use. And if the problem is not a service outage/emergency, you must go through email which takes days to get the typical generic and unhelpful response. I love all of Google's services, but I am/was incredibly frustrated that we actually paid to use their services and then they left us out in the cold when it came to a shortcoming of their infrastructure. We started with a domain for Google Apps and purchased 6 accounts on the domain. A year or so into using their service, we realized we needed to switch our primary domain from ourhabit.com to habitindustries.com. Both the domains are owned by us, and habitindustries.com was at the time setup as an alias on our ourhabit.com domain. Turns out, Google Apps does not support the switch. And not only do they not support it, there is no migration help to move emails or remove the risk of losing email while you transfer over to the new primary domain. And the real kicker? They made us pay for all 6 accounts again on the new primary domain even though we would no longer would be using the old account. If you aren't going to support a basic feature (which is called for again and again and again on their forums), don't make us shell out another $50 per user to mitigate it. Thank god we only had 6 users at the time. Sorry for the rant, but seeing the claim of 24/7 customer support really set me off :)
- aditya 18y ago
  whoa -- good to know, I was merely pointing it out since I know they do claim to have 24/7 support, if it's useless then my point is invalid!
skmurphy 18y ago
Where is the number to call when it's down? Not down for everyone--that's a different problem--down for you: say if you get "locked out."