Reminder that "Core G-Suite" is an official designation, not something I just made up. Right now, their Core G-Suite products are: Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, Sites, Calendars, Hangouts, Hangouts Chat, Hangouts Meet, Plus, Keep, Vault, and Jamboard.
If a team was already using the feature they got to keep it for an extra year or so, but otherwise you had to upgrade at double the price to have the feature.
That being said, it is now implemented in an easier to use way.
Don't recall details, but I believe there were a few other minor functionality losses of that type. I had already moved to the higher tier for unlimited storage and data retention tools.
There's a feeling of a stronger and stronger push to get per user revenue up and up with the new Enterprise level functionality coming at "contact us" pricing.
The last "interaction" I had was convincing/reminding someone to make sure the G Suite account/service they were signing up for was indeed HIPAA compliant, and that they had the signed business agreement with Google to put same in force.
Don't know what the pricing for that was/is. It was more a "don't let your partners and manager do this unless you are sure of it and have this in place", in the context of casual conversation.
Anyone else got such an agreement? If the legalese doesn't preclude saying, how's it priced?
But I don’t think they’ve ever dropped products entirely. Although hangouts has been titled a bunch of different things.
Wow, I could not have stated it better myself. AWS is also like Microsoft in that they start high and commit to only dropping price. They also seem to do a pretty good job at customer service which Google has a reputation for lacking (although that is Amazon's bread and butter).
Unlike many other companies' free/beta offers, Google has made no excessive push to free/beta users out of their accounts. Of course, they do keep trying to upsell you, e.g. in the administrator management console or whatever they're calling it.
All the same, yeah, relying on a "free" account for a business is probably not a good idea.
And, you get no tech support beyond reading their help pages.
I mean, point being I don't trust them not to mess up my workflow. Even if I trusted them to not screw with the core g-suite products, I trust Microsoft more than Google at this point.
If you had told me that I would trust Microsoft more than Google 5 years ago I would have literally thought you were insane.
There's also the fact that they needn't deprecate something to remove or degrade features from it, or alter the workflow significantly enough to make it into a product that's no longer worth using.