When the introduced the $10 / user tier (up from $5), $5 gsuite lost at least one feature that I use: email content filtering. It was implemented in a pretty hard-to-find place, but was effective and had enough functionality to catch, e.g. social security numbers and credit card numbers.

If a team was already using the feature they got to keep it for an extra year or so, but otherwise you had to upgrade at double the price to have the feature.

That being said, it is now implemented in an easier to use way.

Don't recall details, but I believe there were a few other minor functionality losses of that type. I had already moved to the higher tier for unlimited storage and data retention tools.

There's a feeling of a stronger and stronger push to get per user revenue up and up with the new Enterprise level functionality coming at "contact us" pricing.

Well, that sucks. And I've not been keeping up. $10 tier?

The last "interaction" I had was convincing/reminding someone to make sure the G Suite account/service they were signing up for was indeed HIPAA compliant, and that they had the signed business agreement with Google to put same in force.

Don't know what the pricing for that was/is. It was more a "don't let your partners and manager do this unless you are sure of it and have this in place", in the context of casual conversation.

Anyone else got such an agreement? If the legalese doesn't preclude saying, how's it priced?

I’m still wary when they switched from free to pay for small businesses. I think in general it’s not a good idea to use free services for businesses, but in my mind it means that Google makes pretty big changes and don’t care if it disrupts you. Microsoft doesn’t do this or rarely does. If anything they start high and drop. Starting free and climbing is not good.

But I don’t think they’ve ever dropped products entirely. Although hangouts has been titled a bunch of different things.

> I think in general it’s not a good idea to use free services for businesses, but in my mind it means that Google makes pretty big changes and don’t care if it disrupts you. Microsoft doesn’t do this or rarely does. If anything they start high and drop. Starting free and climbing is not good.

Wow, I could not have stated it better myself. AWS is also like Microsoft in that they start high and commit to only dropping price. They also seem to do a pretty good job at customer service which Google has a reputation for lacking (although that is Amazon's bread and butter).

Actually, on this score I think they've been pretty reasonable -- generous, even. Free "beta" G Suite accounts (where you got x users, where x declined over time for new sign ups) have remained active and with the same number of users they got when they first signed up. As long as they are actively in use.

Unlike many other companies' free/beta offers, Google has made no excessive push to free/beta users out of their accounts. Of course, they do keep trying to upsell you, e.g. in the administrator management console or whatever they're calling it.

All the same, yeah, relying on a "free" account for a business is probably not a good idea.

And, you get no tech support beyond reading their help pages.

They don't have to discontinue a product to massively screw with my workflow. All they need to do is change how the product is accessed, or the settings and labs features that are available.

I mean, point being I don't trust them not to mess up my workflow. Even if I trusted them to not screw with the core g-suite products, I trust Microsoft more than Google at this point.

If you had told me that I would trust Microsoft more than Google 5 years ago I would have literally thought you were insane.

Microsoft has been amazing at legacy support. The fact that they had an OS be supported for 12 years is pretty amazing. In contrast Ubuntu's LTS are only 5 years

How old is the official designation? They've certainly deprecated major apps; whether they were outside of some arbitrary core designation or whether they predate it's definition, it's somewhat moot either way.

There's also the fact that they needn't deprecate something to remove or degrade features from it, or alter the workflow significantly enough to make it into a product that's no longer worth using.