I understand you're upset, but that's probably a really naive view. Maybe it seems to you that there is no DIRECT upside for you personally, but there's always an upside, just like there's always a downside for every good thing that happens.
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.
To be clear, I'm not so upset about them killing the free version (although I do think it's sad - all the startups I've been in got our google apps accounts before we even had a bank account - because it was free! I wonder what will happen in the future). I mainly dislike the style of communication here. It really wouldn't be so terrible for Google to say:
While it was very popular we found it was quite costly and
we are not able to justify offering it as a free service on
an ongoing basis. Further we found that people who signed up
under free accounts often had false expectations about the
level of service and support we were able to give them and it
contributed to a negative overall perception of the service.
We apologize to those who are unable to use Google Apps in the
future because of this, but we feel it is an important change
to keep the service profitable and well supported into the future.
I absolutely agree with this. If they are going to dick us over I can understand that because they were offering us something free that costs money to run, but just be straight with us.
I don't think the google apps business customers are this dumb. They aren't going to trick us with this kind of obvious double talk. We are just going to think they are being deceptive and be less understanding.
Free? That's being being pretty disingenuous considering Google is an Advertising/Tracking company with the number one search engine in the world. No one uses any Google service or app for free so technically it was not a "free service". They should be upfront with people in the beginning if they don't want people bitching.
I think the only reason I felt that way was because of how they told us what they were doing. Like they were doing us some kind of favor instead of the exact opposite.
The same thing applied to the removal of the search term with the https connections. 'We're doing it for the privacy of our users'. The same users who will have the keyword information handed over, gladly, if you just pay Google.
The wording was awful, and this and that go to show how long the 'don't be evil' mantra is dead.
I'm all for Google yanking their free Apps account. It's their product, and people can't rightly bitch about something free being removed from the market.
However, it's using politician-grade spin to try and convince smart people that 1=2 which is the insulting bit.
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.
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