I'm pretty much done with Google as supplier of business apps. I have to migrate our company's Google Apps account anyway because of a (domain)name change (which is still hell with Google Apps anyway, you basically have to buy and setup a totally new account an migrate everything by hand or with 3rd party tools), so I might as well look for another supplier.
As much as I dislike everything Microsoft, 365 currently looks well ahead of Google (everything they haven't killed yet has definitely stopped evolving), and has certainly proven to be a more reliable partner for business use.
You can add alternate domains to Google Apps accounts which can work just as the main domain. So you don't have to migrate anything, it is the same account just acknowledges and accepts the alternate domain.
No they don't. This is the reason why this is such a hell. Yes, the account acknowledges the alternate name, but Google keeps publicly replacing it with the primary name as soon as you do anything.
This is not just ugly and confusing from a marketing and branding perspective, it leads to all kinds of complications with software that reacts to email-addresses, or services that are coupled to Google Apps.
Perhaps I am not following 100%, but I believe we have done this without this issue for years with google apps.
We have one primary domain and 15 alias domains.
Email Example: user@alias.com gets an email, when they reply it stays set to the alias, it doesn't change to the primary domain.
Gmail sends a Sender: header with the account's primary email address, which some email programs treat as the "actual" sender. Some mail programs display this as "From alias@example.com on behalf of primay@example.net" and then those programs use the primary as the return address.
According to Google, they don't include this header if you upgrade to Google Apps for Business.
You can add alternate domains to Google Apps accounts which can work just as the main domain.
Until they decide--all of the sudden--that you can't any more (assuming you can now). His point is that Google is unreliable as a long term partner and should not be counted on.
Does Microsoft offer a convenient migration path from Google Apps for Business to Office 365?
I have not found anything on such a migration path so far, only more or less desperate forum posts …
Google Apps also have the advantage that you can mix free and paid accounts. We have for example some employees who share their business calendars (paid accounts) with their family members (free accounts).
Why jump out of the frying pan into the fire? At StartHQ (https://starthq.com) we are trying to build a directory of high quality business web apps from smaller companies such as the ones run by many of us here. Perhaps there's something there that fits your requirements?
I think Aaron Swartz hit the nail on the head with his "What Does Google Mean by “Evil”?" blog post[1]:
> "They specifically name three: showing irrelevant ads, using pop-ups or other annoying gimmicks, and selling off actual search results. Hardly the stuff of comic books. But what do these three have in common? They’re all instances of refusing to make things worse for your users in order to make more money"
This is just about the first time I've seen Google unambiguously break their own definition of 'evil'.
You mean Google broke aaronsw's guess at google's understanding of evil.
Evil is a relative term, and if Microsoft is seen as the Evil empire then cutting off amicable relations (manifested by open interfaces) can be construed as "not evil"
Read the update to the article, where he points out that the entire concept of ads could be construed as evil by some.
There is a continuum of evil - on one end, you have ruthless bloodthirsty organizations who don't balk at breaking all the rules to make a dollar or point, on the other end you have "mostly self-consistent" organizations like FSF and EFF.
Microsoft isn't pure evil, they're were just seen as being closer to the bloodthirsty end than Apple or Google. It used to be that Google was seen as closer to the FSF side than, say, Microsoft.
Nowadays, it's pretty clear all of these big tech firms are not far apart and moving more towards the ruthless side of the spectrum.
Therefore, the leap "evil = make things worse for your users" is not from a google source. That's Aaron's attempt to construct a categorical rule from the examples.
"Google unambiguously break their own definition of 'evil'." <-- False, since google didn't explicitly define evil. They broke what Aaron believed google meant when they said "evil".
Microsoft-level evil would be charging people for the privilege of using the API, like with ActiveSync. Google isn't quite there yet, but they're certainly moving in that direction.
Sure, they charge for hosting your calendar. I was thinking of the fact that you can write an app against Google's calendar API without having to pay, whereas you would have to pay to write an ActiveSync client.
Ohh well thats absolutely fine then if they're killing off all the competition with a subsidised product then switching all the standard access to their own API because they're doing it for ★FREE★.
More specifically, Google is forbidden to replace IETF-approved and wide-acknowledged API with its own proprietary substitute without being accused of being evil.
Seems to be fair enough for me, just in case anyone cares.
Not really, but in this case, they have failed to give any justification for not following a standard that industry giants like Apple follow and which Microsoft is close to implementing on Windows Phone. Perhaps there is a technical reason, but Google not being open about it makes people assume the worst.
It's also in contrast with some of their own previous behavior. When they saw opportunities to make things faster/better, they were comfortable breaking standards (or, well, making new tech that might stand as a standard one day and asking people to let go of older standards). One example: SPDY. Another: go. Additionally, there's a whole bunch of examples from chrome where they broke conventions for user experience and drew people's ire, but in all cases they defended these decisions with well thought out (if controversial) arguments.
Where's the argument against CalDAV? (I'm not saying it doesn't exist, I'm just surprised to not have seen anything from them)
> "They specifically name three: showing irrelevant ads, using pop-ups or other annoying gimmicks, and selling off actual search results.
I think omitting a border around ads and intentionally reducing the contrast from the background to make it invisible to older people and people with bad monitors does count as an annoying gimmick and a user-hostile anti-pattern. The A/B testing would've shown a lot of ad clicks and increase in profit from people who mistake them for organic search results.
The important part is where it specifically says Ads, and then a link to why these ads? though. Contrast should be high enough you can see why ads end, but other than where it's been cropped in the picture you posted, it's still very clear that at least the top result is an advert. You are right that contrast should clearly distinguish ads from not, but you shouldn't crop out the label clearly identifying it as an advert to prove your point.
In addition to that, I'd argue looking at your picture that it really doesn't matter if it's an ad or not - if it were an organic result and you didn't want to file a lawsuit, you wouldn't click it anyway.
The real problem for Google is that Microsoft has better products than Gmail and Google Calender. I am completely fine switching to Outlook web mail services and actually want to move after the way they are handling the active sync situation, the redesign and the closing of services. Once I switch, I would still log in for Google Reader but that ends in July. Google is king of search but the game its playing with these other products are dangerous considering the competition.
Sadly, Microsoft Outlook Web Access isn't an option — if you're looking for self hosted services, which you should, having seen what's happening now. The webmail interface is just ugly and hard to use when handling lots of emails each day (as most people here do, I presume).
As soon as I find something with a decent calendar system (web, CalDav, time zone support, decent interface and subscribing to iCalendar feeds) as well as decent email (useful interface, good filtering, acceptable spam filtering), and hopefully, XMPP support baked in, I'm jumping ship. This is starting to get ugly.
CalDAV is the spring cleaning killing that I'm most surprised about. It should have been obvious to everybody that reader was on track to be killed, but I would have thought that google would be eager to support any product that involves you telling them what your schedule is, whether that's through their calendar app or any other calendaring app you've got connected to their backend.
If you throw out all the 'tit-for-tat' assumptions, it really makes sense. Google has an API for nearly everything. I could easily see this as a standardization approach.
Personally, I'm not effected at all between using the Google calendar website and my android based phone. I think Google's goal is to push everyone to use the API for their calander in future apps. I don't mind doing that for what they provide.
I could easily imagine that use of their API could allow for better data gathering than using the open standard.
> If you throw out all the 'tit-for-tat' assumptions, it really makes sense. Google has an API for nearly everything. I could easily see this as a standardization approach.
Except caldav is just a protocol. It's not an API. Google could have made an API that supports the caldav protocol, but chose not to.
This also effects me a lot, personally, because I have a Kindle Fire and an iPhone, and I use my Google calendar to sync up everything between the two.
So then the Google calander API has always been used, but the data is delivered in CalDev format?
This move would then represent Google refusing to accept that format?
I didn't read things that way.
It makes good business sense - look at Maps API. You can get X number of free calls, but if you go over a certain limit you need to pay (That limit is pretty high if I recall)
So now fast forward to Microsoft and Others incorporating that API into their products - am I understanding correctly Google could charge for API calls similarly?
Microsoft recently filed an amicus brief supporting Oracle's position on API copyright. I wouldn't speculate that this is the motive, but it would be interesting if Microsoft is pressured into using Google APIs
It's funny because while I'm bound to my gmail account by my email address, I use google calendars only because of inertia. I would think that it's a huge benefit to google to know about all of my appointments. The day I can't use google's calendar with Mail.app, either on iOS or OSX, is the day I migrate my calendars to iCloud. Google cant be dumb enough to think that iOS users will use separate calendar apps for their exchange and gmail calendars, can they?
So what's next - no IMAP for gmail? And then force everyone to use a custom gmail app?
I'm getting really nervous about relying so much on Google. I'll be working on transitioning off of them from here on out for all my projects and recommendations. I just learned about the Leaflet map library for example.
I recently caught myself thinking: "How much would someone have to pay me to never use another Google product?" While contemplating my use of gMail, Search, Calendar, YouTube, etc., I wrapped my head around how powerful and irreplaceable Google and its products are to me. Now that they're winding down Reader, I'm reminded at how vulnerable we all are given this reliance.
I've actually been putting numbers on this: there are many fans of NewsBlur, apparently, as a replacement for Google Reader, so that's $12 a year; I'm worried about being tied to my Gmail address, so I finally got around to setting up a vanity domain address which forwards to Gmail and that's going to be about $10 a year. So I'm up to $22 a year, and I haven't looked into any free or paid replacements for Google Calendar or Analytics...
Between Google retiring stuff and Twitter's ongoing war against client developers, I'm seriously considering just packing up and self-hosting everything I care about on my VPS.
I've been thinking along the same lines. To begin I'd like to just mirror everything on a VPS (email, rss, calendars, dropbox, music library, youtube playlists, bookmarks (for me: pinboard)) on the VPS.
Then I'd have cobble together whatever oss webapps I need to access all that remotely, and then lock the whole thing down -- ideally only allow external access via ssh and then set up my phone/laptop to VPN through it when I want access.
It would be at least a day of work to set it all up but I think I've almost reached the requisite pain point.
EDIT: and it would be nice if I could run phone numbers through it as well via something like http://voip.ms/ ... if anyone is aware of someone doing something like this and writing it up I'd be interested to know, I haven't come across any setup like this.
pobox.com (http://pobox.com/pricing) is a fairly stable domain for email with lifetime hosting for as low as $20/yr (forwarding only) or $50/yr (hosting)
I think NearlyFreeSpeech.net is probably about as stable a forwarding host, and cheaper. (I host my http://www.gwern.net on Amazon S3/Cloudflare at ~$4/month or $48, so pobox.com wouldn't be cheaper in toto unless you meant web hosting rather than email.)
Well, that depends. I had the same reaction, and my thought was to basically go the opensource route, but some products almost have to be replaced with a company. Products I use from Google:
* Search - replace with duck duck go
* Chrome - Firefox, most likely, but there are tons of browser options these days.
* Voice - this is the one that really has me hooked into the service. Not sure what I'd use instead, if not just a regular phone number.
* reader - now built into owncloud, dozens of reader replacements popping up.
* youtube - probably won't replace. I usually don't log in any way. Uploads that I do occasionally post will go to vimeo.
* gmail - aside from the hassle of switching, rolling an email server isn't too hard. downtime is a concern, but I could mitigate this by hosting it in the cloud somewhere, or even doing a colo backup at a friend's house. Paying for email is an option, I suppose, which could have benefits.
Other than that, I'm not sure. These moves by Google recently just seem skeevy to me. I think it started with the G+ stuff, but since then my trust in Google is waning, so this is a thing I think about somewhat regularly now.
See the real thing Google has is not that they offer a bunch of services, it's that those services are all tied together very neatly.
When I transition to a new computer all I have to do is install chrome and I basically have everything I need - the login will get me all my extensions + put me in email, calander, voice, youtube, and search. All with one login, that's the power, people are lazy, they don't really care about OSS or freedom, they follow the path of least resistance, and in this case that's Google, good or evil.
It sucks but it's true. I keep thinking about moving to a different email provider but then I have to find one that does all the things that gmail does, and has a decent calender app (there is NO replacement for voice) and something that does search in an okay and understandable way. I can't find one. The only reason I use facebook over G+ is because I don't know anyone on G+ otherwise that too wold be my social network of choice. In addition my University uses Gapps so I'd be stuck with google regardless (for at least the next four years).
And really that's the issue, so far it seems from history that once you reach a certain critical mass, there is no way to not be evil, Google was great until about 2011, but they've turned on us....
wow...just realized this is a lot of rambling... still I make a couple good points
This is kinda the rough spot for me too. Google services are just so damned convenient. Especially with the integration. I noticed the same thing you have. Computer dies? No big, fix it and sign into Chrome. I'm 90% there.
However, with Reader, it's kinda served as a warning to me. I use this stuff every day. Reader was just kinda the reminder that I don't own any of this stuff, and they can turn it off at any time. 2 years ago, I had basically zero fear of something like that. Today, especially with CalDAV support getting killed, it's just another warning to me that Google is a different company than it was.
Anyway, I'm typing this on Chrome in between reading Gmail and Google Voice messages and stuff, but I'm definitely looking for alternatives. Too much of my life relies on Google. Don't want all my eggs in one basket.
Interesting list. This got me wondering if there are any zero-knowledge email providers out there, especially ones that let you use your own domain. Only thing I found so far though is an empty Quora question:
For that particular need, I'd expect that I'm rolling my own, or using a service provided by my business or something. At the very least, I'd assume that I'm paying for it, and even then, when you get to that level, you probably want to just do it yourself for the knowledge that you really do have complete control.
Yup, I'd expect to pay for such a thing, no problem with that, just don't see any even for pay. Rolling my own is the other alternative, will probably end up doing that.
With all the reader noise I missed CalDAV would be killed. I just checked Apple Calendar and realized that its set up to sync with my Google Calendar with CalDAV?
Does anyone know if Apple is one of those whitelisted developers?
"Google's CalDAV page already lists the API as being "deprecated." A note on the page adds "If you think you have a compelling use case and would like to be whitelisted for the new version of CalDAV API, please fill out this form."
...
Google, however, confirmed this will not impact the agreement with Microsoft and that the Softies will still be able to implement CalDav support on Windows Phone."
That article, and many of the others linked from within show that it is very unclear what's going on exactly. It would appear that Microsoft is only planning on implementing CalDAV in Windows Phone but has, as of yet, not confirmed it.
It does appear that they have confirmed not supporting CalDAV on Windows 8, RT, or Outlook. And since Google is phasing out support for ActiveSync come 7/31/2013, the only way to sync with Google calendars and contacts is from Outlook 2010 and earlier, and only if you are a paid apps user. (using ActiveSync)
Exchange server is $10 per month at Rackspace [1] I've heard good things about Microsoft Office 365 as well. Then, there's always Google Apps for Business...
Having transferred companies to both O365 and GApps from Exachange I really have to say that O365 is a horrible product. It is slow and nearly everything about the back-end seems like it was put together in haste.
I use Kerio (which is available either hosted or you can do what I do and self host). I'm technically a reseller, although I've never sold their hosted product. I think pricing is lower than Google Apps for Business, but who cares within a factor of 2 or so?
The MSFT change in position on supporting CalDAV (and the linked Win8 help page) is news to me. My Windows Phone 8 is still syncing with Gmail calendar. Does anyone know what's really going on here?
Google only supports open standards when it is convenient for them to do so. Now its no longer convenient for them to support CalDav out goes the open standard.
I'm sure IMAP support in Gmail will be next on the chopping block.
That would bum me out because I don't like their IMAP for grabbing emails. I've had a number of messages have weird issues where the rest of another email is appended to it at the end.
> If you’re a developer and the Calendar API won’t work for you, please fill out this form to tell us about your use case and request access to whitelisted-only CalDAV API
I hope a lot of developers write to google and just tell them they simply can't afford resources to support proprietary APIs when perfectly good open APIs exist. That's a good enough reason to me. The idea that Google is going to continue maintaining a CalDAV API but expects legions of 3rd party developers to devote time and effort to making special calendar integrations for their proprietary API is obnoxious. At very least, some more rationalization of this is needed from Google.
Seems like a proxy layer that speaks CalDAV on one end and Google Calendar API on the other might be handy. Any idea of how much the latter API has that would be difficult to translate?
I think this news highlights a more general problem. How can we call something an "open standard" if it's controlled by one company in such a way that they can shut it down at whim. Open sourcing should be a requirement to be an "open standard", or am I missing something?
For one reason, Google has a paid enterprise offering that they sell under contract and dropping support for this is the second shoe to drop in breaking one of its most important components for commercial use. Not every small business has the resources or inclination to DIY their own hosted calendar service, especially when they're already paying for one.
There's Baikal Server[1], which is a pretty neat project that allows you to host and manage several CalDAV and CardDAV accounts on a server. Have been running it for nearly two months with absolutely no issue.
Nobody's pulling the rug out from under me. Except me.
For me, I have no problem running my own contacts/calendar server with calDAV/cardDAV support. I really hate running email servers though - and it's really nice to have your contacts and calendars integrated with your webmail.
I've been looking for a good calendar/contacts server, my general requirement being a really understandable backend data format (i.e. so I can just copy my home directory off the server and get everything).
Radicale looks nice, but I haven't managed to get it to work properly so far.
I moved off of Google Calendar and Google Reader (and have never used GMail) for exactly these reasons several months ago. I do not want to be dependent on free services or ones that might go away. I know this could be true for any company - but at least for ones I am paying for I have support agreements.
Reader - Self-hosted Fever, although currently evaluating Tiny Tiny RSS. Checked out Newsblur a while back but felt like the interface was too busy/animated (same reason I left Reader). TTRSS feels a lot like Bloglines of old (which I loved but seemed to die on the vine)
Calendar - Bouncing between my email host's solution (pobox.com has a caldav/carddav server now) and iCloud, but considering setting up my own caldav/carddav server.
Well this is disappointing, to say the least. At least replace it with a better open standard, or I won't use google calendar, which is probably my favorite google product after gmail.
Short, worst-case answer: Google web calendars no longer syncing with Microsoft or Apple's local ones. There are finer points and some exceptions, but that's the basic bottom line.
It remains to be seen. Google has said that they will "whitelist" certain developers to continue using CalDAV which is what iCal uses to sync both the Mac & iPhone. One would hope/expect that Apple will be one of those developers.
No one from either company has commented or confirmed it either way. It's a major reason why people are so surprised and incredulous about Google moving away from the standard.
Is there any stated reason for deprecating CalDAV support? I hope the new Calendar API is open enough for platforms like Blackberry, Ubuntu Mobile, Jolla and Firefox OS etc to tap into.
It's increasingly looking like Google is making it hard for other platforms except it's own Android and iOS(can't ignore iOS because of the number of users) to interoperate with its services like Youtube, Gmail, Calendar etc.
Even if the Calendar API were open to all platforms, it's not a standard, it's just an API unilaterally defined by Google. CalDAV, however, is a standard <https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4791>. It is certainly an evil move from Google to try to replace an existing open standard with an API defined exclusively by them (unless they have technical grounds to do so, and considerate and documented extensions to the existing standard are not a viable approach).
To make things worse, Google's support for their own APIs is pretty weak - I had some bad experiences with them.
Calendar API wasn't the worst - okay, I didn't get any response from Google guys on a bug I ran into, but they eventually fixed it (and lack of user support is pretty much a norm for them now).
The situation with Spreadsheets is way worse - the API is pretty much abandoned, no changes or any reaction to bugs/complaints for a few months now. They'd roll out a new API version, remove the old documentation (instead of marking it as deprecated but accessible), but the new documentation is really lacking - only has examples in C#, and even these are incomplete.
So, yeah, moving from open standards to their own API is very bad - not just because it's locking up people or something, but also because they are not supporting _their own APIs_ properly.
Yeah, CalDAV != Calendar API. I've always had nightmares hooking anything to it reliably over time. I finally just gave up and use Googles stuff to access it (after years).
They're going down the Facebook route, they want to lock you into their AOL-style walled garden. I was surprised the other day when I went to share a video from Google+ to Facebook, turns out I couldn't, it wasn't a youtube video as I had expected.
Just like PG said in one of his essays, Google is now the new Microsoft. It used to be about giving hackers tools to build on top of their services. Now, its all about turning the search engine into a social network.
And before the Google army comes in, let me say one thing. I used to love Google. Used all of their services. Built stuff with their services. Each computer I touched got Chrome installed. I was a fan boy. But then they started changing. Ever since G+, they just seem hell bent on becoming a social network. That shit really pissed me off. How do you simply go from awesome company to this? I'll tell you how. Because its now being run by people who put profits first, and not the users/programmers. They seem to have forgotten that it was us who gives them the profits they get. Such is the reason I'm building Nuuton. Because fuck you Google.
As someone often accused of being a Google "fanboi"... I agree. I'm not going to abandon Go or Chrome or anything because they are fully OSS so if Google drops them it isn't the end of the world, but I wouldn't dream of building a service (even a free for-fun one) on top of some Google Web API these days.
Maybe that's fine with them (seems like they have a corporate mission to eliminate the whole idea of free or nearly-free web APIs anyway), but regardless of their motivations they've proven to be a non-reliable provider of stable free-to-use web APIs over the past couple of years.
Yeah, that's the crazy aspect to this. I really like Go, Chrome, and a lot of the other things they offer. But to quote a character named Mr. Lahey from from the tv show "Trailer Park Boys": "Its all a shit-storm now."
I think a lot of the fingerpointing at Google has been ridiculous and way overblown. But there have been a few things, and I think the services they've shut down (eg, Wave and Labs and now Reader) are a good indicator of their new "focus".
With the death of Reader, my last shred of goodwill is basically gone. I've used an @gmail.com address for the past six years despite having my own domain, and now that's going to stop as I gradually transition off most of their services.
always use your name@YOURdomain.com. Google, yahoo and MS can always cut you off in a heartbeat. With your own domain, you can forward it to a new provider.
That's why I will 'never' embrace cloud that tightly.
> And before the Google army comes in, let me say one thing. I used to love Google. Used all of their services. Built stuff with their services. Each computer I touched got Chrome installed. I was a fan boy. But then they started changing.
Just because they didn't satisfy your demands you decide to take such a drastic turn? Perhaps they were trying to satisfy other casual Internet users as well.
Not to say you're wrong or whatever, but a huge company like Google tries to satisfy as many people as possible to increase their market-share. I don't necessarily see something wrong as long as all the negative side affects aren't solely absorbed by the consumer.
There's nothing wrong with compromises here and there - any healthy relationship consistently needs to deal with them.
I don't think that Google showing a propensity to give services the axe, rather than simply deprecating them and giving them little or no support is a case of "not satisfying demands." That, mixed with their history of spotty support for the things which they DO officially support gives them the appearance of being a shifting platform. This lead me, at least, to depend on them as little as I have to.
Hey, that's your opinion and I can't call it wrong! Although I strongly feel like Google Reader was by far the most used service they are going to axe. I was pretty upset when Google Notebook was axed, but I just moved my data elsewhere. I don't really expect much with deprecation after that incident because while the service was deprecated, the lack of support/updates just left me never wanting to use it anymore.
If that is the tipping point for you, then by all means show support for alternatives. I know I do a terrible job at ensuring Google isn't the only player in the game.
Nuuton sounds interesting. For me though, search isn't the biggy, gmail is the big one that I'd love to replace.
I imagine a pinboard.in like service but for mail (cheap, fast, simple, run by a developer that I trust to worst case mail me a DVD of my mail history). I'd jump to that very quickly.
For my day job I work on a Calendar application. We provide a CalDav service for customers to access their Calendar data. While it can get tricky to support all the variations, it's a solid standard that makes integration really easy.
One problem we have is that Android doesn't natively support CalDav, so we can't integrate with the built-in Android calendar like we can with iOS's calendar.
For those that work with calendars, CalDav is a well documented standard for sharing calendar data. It robustly handles all the use cases that we've been able to think of (including edge cases).
It's disappointing to hear that Google will discontinue the service. I'm sure lots of iOS and Mac users use the CalDav sync to natively sync their Google Calendar to their devices. How will users of native apps be able to get their calendar now?
This is massively bad news if both CalDAV & EAS support will be ixnayed by google before end of year.
I have been a long time android user and had every intention of continuing down that path, but recently my job has required me to use Exchange ActiveSync to access my corporate mail & calendar data on my device, its a bit of a hassle but at least it's supported.
Does this mean that future versions of android will not have support for such a (common business related) setup?
If this is true I foresee it alienating a large portion of their user base.
As much as I dislike everything Microsoft, 365 currently looks well ahead of Google (everything they haven't killed yet has definitely stopped evolving), and has certainly proven to be a more reliable partner for business use.