Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

That's the key: engagement. Which is basically "how many times a user interacts with objects on screen". This says nothing about whether a product is good or bad. In case of Netflix, no doubt, engagement was through the roof as users scrambled to mute, pause, or move to the next screen.

In fact, I can hardly think of a serious product or service quite like this. Not even cars are like this. You have maintenance, resale, insurance and financing to consider.

This idea of an easy, objective way to 'calculate costs' is never really quite possible.

There are usually going to be some degree of Apples-to-Oranges comparisons, situations wherein small issues make a big difference. You want a sales person to be there to make sure that your potential customer is aware of the options.

In addition, there is of course the 'Total Cost of Ownership' - meaning that much of the 'cost' of something is not apparent in the calculation. Training, support, etc.. On the far end of that spectrum you have the strategic issues such as vendor lock-in etc..

So, even just trying to establish a fairly objective 'true cost' calculation will be hard.

Next, you have the fact that most enterprise sales are not 'off-the-shelf' - pricing is subject to negotiation, which can vary a lot. This makes it difficult to set price.

Then, you have communications issues around a sale - these are complicated products, the last thing you ever want is for customers inputting some information, and getting the wrong numbers back, or the wrong impression. If there is any money involved, it's worth the time to talk to a sales person to smooth over issues.

Finally, is of course the sales organisations ability to pitch, sell and spin. Of course this includes the shifty areas wherein the team will want to sell a service even when they know they are not the best option.

So a 'raw cost calculator' is possibly just a big, risky bit of possible misinformation and lost opportunity to make a sale.

The 'technical' aspect of making a 'cost calculator' is completely mundane to the point of being irrelevant. In fact, Google Engineers might be too overqualified to even do such a thing.

I see a 'cost calculator' has having two completely different roles:

1) As a 'sales lead' - something new customers can input information into, which is going to almost assuredly give them a good perspective, but wherein the true and only purpose of the calculator is to generate a lead, so that a sales person can chime in.

2) A customer-centric calculator, for established customers that is tuned to their account status and discounts and let's the IT manager or business lead do projections on the service.

I used to evangelize Macs with my friends and family, since the mid 2000s (before the iPhone revolution) and it served me and the people I pushed it to well. At least until a few years ago with the whole new MBP fiasco with the touchbar and butterfly keyboard and no ports and a minimum price in the mid 2000s. But it’s hardware and people can continue using what they already own for the most part till Apple fixed a lot of those issues.

But with Google I have been burnt. A lot. I got my family on Picasa to share photos, and Google stopped supporting it. Personally, Google Reader always stings. And whatever google did with GChat and Hangouts, which I pushed on all my friends, was embarrassing.

At least I gave up on recommending Google products before Allo and Duo. My friends who did that turn red when they are mentioned to this day.

And then there’s GSuite. A clients company switched wholesale on my recommendation right at the beginning. They’ve been using it for almost its entire existence (right from the days when it was Google Apps? and the first 10 users were free). They’ve been spending a ton of money on it for so long, but they couldn’t get a Google rep to offer them a discount on 5 accounts (basically they wanted tiered access and did not want to bring everyone onto the most expensive plans because a few users were not full time employees and using it for very basic purposes). It was a matter of a few hundred dollars a year, but between the fact that they could hardly get a rep to talk to them, and when they did the reps had absolutely no flexibility, MS reps swooped in, offered tiered access, discounts, and a full time rep and within a couple of months they were a complete O365 shop.

They still miss their email search, but overall it’s been completely worth it.

It’s still mind boggling to me how Google’s managed to screw this up.