I can understand the attitude, but personally I don't second it.
I think the better question is: Do you care enough to divert some time away from building your product?
Some folks might be really motivated by not going with Google Workspace. Others don't care at all. There can be great motivational effects in doing what you think is right, I wouldn't discount it as a purely economical decision. Sure, tools need to be efficient, but we also need to enjoy them.
There’s also the leadership capital lens - you will 100% annoy a significant percentage of the org implementing a non standard data solution. That will come back to bite you down the line. Choose your battles.
Depends on your workers and also the kind of company you are. If you're building a privacy-conscious product and you've recruited people that share the same values, they'd applaud you not going for a cloud solution. I certainly would.
I think this viewpoint would be more common here in Europe.
And our conpany's O365 also has significant downtime. We've had several major incidents in the last months alone (one of which was the crowdstrike related one, which we don't use but apparently Microsoft do)
If you care less about spending any amount of time on your product than whatever it is you emotionally get out of hosting Nextcloud instead of using Google Workspace, beware.
This is not about Nextcloud vs GW. The spooky bit is that you consider taking on additional burden with something that will not improve your product in any way, when your product is the only reason why your startup maybe exists in the future.
That's a particularly dangerous habit to pick up, because you will have 1000 chances to make meaningless decisions and distract yourself every day.
Unless you have an extremely convincing reason to do something — and if you are wondering, you don't — don't.
Also, while this decision is easy, other choices are nuanced. Kubernetes or EC2 or managed containers or Firebase? I say there is no clear winner for all use cases. But if you are spending innovation tokens (or fractions of) all the time these choices get even more muddy.
First to market/move fast mentality will never consider it. And it’s usually over something that doesn’t really matter like this. Let people have their nextcloud!
EU is worried about the European data stored in US (for good reasons). They don’t want their digital assets leave the region, even if the American services are good.
The price is also not $10 per month. You have to increasingly upgrade for features that Nextcloud offers for free, particularly if they are used by enterprise (like multi user accounts).
I think the better question is: Do you care enough to divert some time away from building your product?
Some folks might be really motivated by not going with Google Workspace. Others don't care at all. There can be great motivational effects in doing what you think is right, I wouldn't discount it as a purely economical decision. Sure, tools need to be efficient, but we also need to enjoy them.