[woofie11]

And I just got f-ed by the Google Cloud team this morning, albeit their Workspace division and not GCP.

I have a GSuite legacy account for my personal domain name. Most of my family is on it. It was free.

I just tried to set up Google Voice on one of the accounts. I learned that they silently disabled setting up new phone numbers in 2019.

And on my main account, long distance calling stopped working about a month ago. No notice, no nothing.

It's been gradually bit-rotting for years, but this is kinda a big deal. My kids can't get phone numbers associated with their main Google account because I set it up when Google was supporting personal domains? That's obnoxious.

Support goes nowhere, naturally. Google says "Use workspace support." Workspace says "Upgrade to have support."

And obviously, pricing is prohibitive given that this is now a B2B offering, and my whole family is on the domain. Cousins, aunties, and all. $6/user/month gets super-expensive super-fast.

Stuff like this means Google loses millions of dollars of business elsewhere. I keep swiping my credit card for Amazon, as does my company.

[hg35h4]

> I have a GSuite legacy account for my personal domain name. Most of my family is on it. It was free.

Oh boy they've been really trying to push people off GSuite legacy hard. I started missing incoming emails, testing would show a server error about a high email flow for maybe a dozen per day. Zero support, and they erased my posts on their support board. You can't change the primary domain as free, you can't use any email diag tools, you can't do anything.

I ended up moving to Zoho. Sure it's not free, but it's not outrageous for personal/family use. Decent migration tools as well. It really started a hard de-Googlification. I nix any chatter about using Google at work now as well.

[hn_throwaway_99]

I certainly do fault Google for what they're doing (especially the "long distance calling stopped working about a month ago. No notice, no nothing." part).

At the same time, free services is part of the problem, and I'm glad Google is shutting some of this stuff down. If anything, I think Google's biggest issue in the enterprise has been they just haven't had the corporate DNA to do enterprise-level support well for paying customers. IMO they've improved in that regard in the past couple years.

[woofie11]

To be clear, that's just what happened this morning, between posts. Google has a looooooong history of this stuff, including with paid accounts, services, and partnership worth millions to Google. Just last month, Google f---d me as a developer integrating through Google APIs.

Free service culture is part of the problem, but it's not quite as simple as stopping free service. Google can't drop shut down the free stuff without losing most of their revenue. Most of Google's business is collecting my data through search and otherwise and serving me ads. In Google's main business, customers are statistics. If you're not paying, you're the product. I'm worth a few pennies to Google advertisers, so if I cost Google more than that, they can drop me. That culture creeps into enterprise. Stir in the classic Google arrogance and the new Google incompetence, and bad things happen a lot.

In the case of GSuite, keeping these things running and working would be almost free. Many of us signed up since it meant being able to use out own domain name, not for any business purpose. Google is being deliberately mean to GSuite Legacy customers to try to pressure us to upgrade, since that's the intersection of their classic culture ("We don't care about individual customers"), enterprise thinking ("We want to charge people"), and general apathy+arrogance ("We know better than our customers").

The result is what you saw above: when people do leave, they're fed up enough with Google they won't use it for anything. The lesson is clear: You can't trust Google with anything important. De-Googlify. If I didn't have elderly relatives who know how to use GSuite and probably won't learn anything else, I'd be gone in a second.

I've cost Google millions of dollars of business at my current company alone. Whenever people even think of using Google, I walk them through a dozen similar failures in both B2B and B2C settings, and showed them the dumpster fires that resulted. I've never seen anyone go with Google after that. That's not to mention the first time I used Google Cloud, when Google cost itself millions.