Hacker News Reader

Comment by Slippery_John | Hacker News Reader

They claim that they don't use your emails on gsuite the same way as they use it on gmail proper, but I find it very difficult to trust them on that.

View on HN

To betray their paying customers’ trust on the pennies they would make would be a truly boneheaded move.

Not everything is about money, you know?

Your post implies that companies (or even just Google in particular) don't make a habit of making truly boneheaded moves. I think that's a pretty difficult position to back up.

Didn't Google do exactly this with school accounts a while ago?

Researched briefly and this was the best I found but I have memories of something even more juicy: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/02/google-ef...

According to a 2017 Reuters report (most recent I found), G-suite gets them revenue of about 1.3B/year. Advertising revenue is more than 80B/year.

It might be scummy, and certainly risky, but you can hardly say it would be boneheaded to risk damaging a $1B segment to improve an $80B segment.

Never forget: Google is an advertising company. They're not a hosting company, or a SAAS company, or a phone/laptop company, and certainly not a browser company or a mobile OS company. They may dip their toes in lots of areas, but the core is solidly about advertising.

Conversely, foregoing additional ad revenue and other benefits of using emails from the relatively few number of G-Suite accounts likely has an incredibly small direct impact on the bottom line. I can't speak for any internal data Google has, but my guess would be that individuals using G-Suite accounts are more likely to use Google services in their personal lives. Any lost benefits or ad revenue would be easy to write off as a negligible loss leader.

Heck, with how common G-Suite is used in schools, getting kids used to Gmail early would be a powerful argument on its own. Though writing it out like that kind of feels a bit dirty.

There are plenty of companies that manage to make money from a diverse portfolio. If Google wants to be successful in enterprise offerings they need to set up business units with P&L responsibilities so that they don't conflict with the rest of the business. Or they should spin it out as a separate company. There are lots of ways to solve this problem.

Speaking as a long-time G-Suite user the offering currently feels a little lost. It's a bit disappointing considering the initial promise of the product. Aside from personal inconvenience, letting it die would be damaging to Google's ability to sell into enterprise markets.

But how much is the data mining worth?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com