NYT: Google Says It’s Time for Longtime Small-Business Users to Pay Up

[britechguy]

Google Says It’s Time for Longtime Small-Business Users to Pay Up

The end of Gsuite Legacy.

 

[Sky-Knight]

“They’re basically strong-arming us to switch to something paid after they got us hooked on this free service,”

Yes... this... has been this... always. Any expectation otherwise is silly.

The guy that is complaining in the article claims to operate a test prep facility. If it's education, or especially if it's non-profit, Microsoft basically gives it all away still via tech soup.

For the rest, yeah a clear deadline would be nice. But there's a problem with that... Google HAS NEVER done this. They drop products on a whim all the time!

If you want clear published end of life dates, it's time to swap to Microsoft. Who told us Windows 10 was going away almost a half decade in advance. They warned us IE was going away a decade and a half in advance! Microsoft does many things wrong, but they have always given us clear guidelines on product lifecycles. Sometimes things will live longer than planned, but they're almost never shorter.

 

[HCHTech]

they're almost never shorter.

I don't know, all three of the dedicated Microsoft Bob users might disagree with you.

 

[Markverhyden]

As the saying goes if you're not paying for it you are the product. I guess the value of that product is now zero in the advertising world.

 

[Sky-Knight]

I don't know, all three of the dedicated Microsoft Bob users might disagree with you.

Also Microsoft Accounting... which I miss horribly... but yeah, these are very much edge cases, and usually train wrecks that never should have been released.

Microsoft Accounting is the only exception to the above I can recall, it was the best Quickbooks alternative on the shelf and very competitively priced. But Microsoft couldn't convince people to actually use it. Still makes me sad, because it was amazing.

 

[mark-tech]

I have had some clients use this before & now have to upgrade if they want to use it. I have a personal google legacy / gsuite account I had used for personal family use. Here is a recent notice by Google I received...

 

[NviGate Systems]

I've been a paid customer for almost a decade now, to me it made the most sense to have a paid service, plus it was my own domain, so it wouldn't be flagged in most cases where some services would block "free" emails and I never had to worry about migrating emails from one ISP to another.