41–50 of 475 posts
Don't see much of a problem here - I'm surprised they didn't do this sooner - I'm happy to pay for this service at that price - no problem.
I wonder if the cause of this is the support costs required for the free accounts? Obviously personal GMail is plug-and-play, but for someone who can't spell DNS, setting up a domain account was never quite drop-dead-simple enough. I suspect the goal here is to create a barrier to entry and prevent the inevitable support load of free users. There was an excellent post about this a while ago, where a developer reporte…
And Google Apps was actually quite easy to setup, partly because Google documented it pretty well but mostly because many DNS providers would basically do a one-click Google Apps setup automatically for you.
I really hate it when companies try to sugar coat a decision that is all downside for their customers. It may be really hard to do, but Google should just come out and say it: there is no upside for this to anyone except Google . It is not about giving you a better experience or making things more straightforward . It is all about Google deciding to maximize their profits at the expense of their users. That's fine, i…
This looks to me just synonymous to killing a high maintenance, low returns project so that they can focus better on either the business version or other stuff. The "indirect" upside is you get other Google products of better quality.
This is unfortunate indeed. The free Google Apps offering was a substantial value. What viable alternatives are there?
Any other decent, free IMAP hosts out there? Ever since the Gmail UI shit the bed and mail clients grew an archive button I don't really need Google Apps itself anymore anyway.
I migrated off Google a year ago to my own server, took a day to sit down and understand/configure it and have since then run smoothly w/o me touching it. And since I host some other people's domains and mail for a small fee, I actually earn a few $ / year.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And? You want this to be free? It clearly costs money.
How so? It's essentially the same service as gmail, only with a different domain. The incremental cost to them is zero, and they make the same revenue as they do from a gmail user.
I really hate it when companies try to sugar coat a decision that is all downside for their customers. It may be really hard to do, but Google should just come out and say it: there is no upside for this to anyone except Google . It is not about giving you a better experience or making things more straightforward . It is all about Google deciding to maximize their profits at the expense of their users. That's fine, i…
>When I see ridiculous sugar coating it breeds distrust and disbelief - congratulations, I now believe every single future thing you say a little less, well done. And I will especially distrust any new "free" services you decide to offer.
Contrarian view... by offering One could argue that the removal of the free tier at this point is simply because they've created an entrenched position, but one could also suggest that this creates a modicum of opportunity for another player to try to enter this space. Certainly until today the $ size of the addressable market in the small business email space was practically $0 given Google's position. [discuss :)]
Rackspace Mail (formerly MailTrust) has about 200k paying customers for small business e-mail hosting. I've been paying them to host mail on 8 of my domains for years -- Gmail was never appealing to me for various reasons -- so the 24/7/365 support, daily backups and 100% uptime SLA easily made MT/Rackspace the right choice.
It's $2 per mailbox per month, or less than half Google's price, but there's a minimum of $10 a month -- so it's only cheaper if you have at least a couple mailboxes/users.
As an aside, Google also gives away web analytics for free, yet there's still a billion dollars a year spent at other web analytics firms. There are always ways to compete with free.
Contrarian view... by offering One could argue that the removal of the free tier at this point is simply because they've created an entrenched position, but one could also suggest that this creates a modicum of opportunity for another player to try to enter this space. Certainly until today the $ size of the addressable market in the small business email space was practically $0 given Google's position. [discuss :)]