> He said it wasn’t about the money. His problem was the hassle. He had to figure out whether to continue using Google or find another option.
So… it is about the money then? Looks like NYT will run any story these days.
So… it is about the money then? Looks like NYT will run any story these days.
> “It was less about the amount they’re charging and more about the fact that they changed the rules,” Mr. Oksavik said. “They could change the rules again at any time.”
Sounds like some businesses have moved to Nextcloud, Zoho and iCloud due to the trust issues created by this sudden change by Google.
They don't want to admit it, therefore they often come up with varying arguments such as "the changes comes too fast, hassle to change, you promised it would be free forever, etc)...
And as a paid service, Google's customer support and reputation is comparatively shoddy, which is partially why various things are given away for free. At least that way they could take market share and then make money off of the data. I expect "must pay for it" Google Workspace to do as poorly as G Suite before it. But, as Google has deep pockets, I think they allow themselves the luxury to keep that division around.
For the "big" players it seems it'd be eaay enough for me to use a keychain application synchronized across multiple 3rd-party platforms. This would let me define my "total" identity privately (in my personal keychain) without having to worry about cross-vendor contamination.
The hide-my-email hack from iCloud is not a "real" substitute. A change-in-behavior from Apple would cause issues everywhere else.
This really feels like a place a co-op or a govt agency with incentives aligned to its members could really help...
Alternately, a bit of legislation requiring email-less account generation, or allowing credit card providers to enforce such provisions would work.
There is nothing sudden about asking money for a free service, you must expect to pay for value provided at some point.
There's no such thing as "never", but you can definitely pay enough for a service that the service provider agrees to not change things for a certain period of time. The main risk is that the company might disappear but that's why some businesses choose large established players instead of SMEs.
> There is nothing sudden about asking money for a free service, you must expect to pay for value provided at some point.
For a long time the value users provided to Google was the data. But of course that promotion was more important than the public good-will...
That’s exactly the issue here - they weren’t paying anything for the service provided.
> For a long time the value users provided to Google was the data
But Google doesn’t and hasn’t used Workspace data for Ads (1). That would be bad business.
(1) https://workspace.google.com/learn-more/security/security-wh...