[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.