[vel0city]

They've been selling Google Workspace for 16 years. Its one of the biggest MDM platforms out there. ~~There are over 2 billion users of this paid enterprise suite.~~ Guess I was wrong on that figure, >2 billion users with >6 million paid subscriptions.

[scarface74]

Those are non paid users

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3637079/as-google-move...

> As of March 2020, there were 6 million paid customers, according to Google’s most recent publicly available stats.

[vel0city]

Ah, I misread their announcements.

There's still supposedly over 2 billion users of these services. Its not a small project with a niche client set where absolutely nobody pays. Reader was popular, but not 2 billion users popular. How many people do you think really used Allo? Its really not in the same space as the many products they've killed.

[scarface74]

It matters because Microsoft uses its much larger paying installed based to support a slew of first party and third party companies to provide “enterprise support”. They have hundreds of people in sales that report back to MS what large enterprises want.

People on HN don’t grok “the enterprise”.

I mentioned in another post, that even though I work for $BigTech, I work in the cloud enterprise consulting space (not Azure). Dealing with the enterprise is a completely different beast than dealing with other tech companies. Microsoft has almost four decades of experience in the space.

Even on the personal side, I would much rather deal with MS for my one lonely 5 person Office365 subscription than Google support.