By now Google often acts worse than the complaints departments of many government agencies, which at least usually by law have to have a human accesible to you somewhere along the line. Yet it keeps getting recommended by either the clueless or the indifferent.
When you are not paying for the product then you are the product!!
But it is NOT that hard for HN community to get VOIP number over SIP. All the smart phones have a sip client now days.
B2B and go to a conference? Where are you putting your video demo reels/talks? YouTube
Consumer and testing marketing messages for something non-consumer? Google Ads.
Your B2B client wants you to provide your SaaS via a private endpoint on GCP? What else are you going to do than use GCP?
Then once you are on it on company computers, it's a short walk to Google Docs and then Google Workspace, etc.
Please, enough justification for why almost anyone generally "needs" Google.
For example:
>B2B and go to a conference? Where are you putting your video demo reels/talks? YouTube
Really? Simply no alternatives exist? I guess Vimeo is just a curious internet legend.
>Your B2B client wants you to provide your SaaS via a private endpoint on GCP? What else are you going to do than use GCP?
So explain to the client why you prefer not to use Google, but if they insist, then keep it specific to them and avoid it for anything generally essential to your business. You state this as if nearly a dozen alternatives to Google Cloud don't exist.
>Then once you are on it on company computers, it's a short walk to Google Docs and then Google Workspace, etc.
Don't take that short walk then, take another one instead.
The point is that alternative solutions do usually exist and even where Google becomes unavoidable, it absolutely shouldn't mean having to fully embrace its services.
If your business-focused founder or Marketing guy is going to the conference, it'll be Youtube, even though Vimeo is accessible. Unless you go make the account, share it to them, and have a SOP, why would they look at Vimeo?
The problem is when you get any sort of size the non-tech people choose Google as a default and then it (with weak force) slowly black holes up what they do. Just like people chose Microsoft Office (and still do for mature corps) for all kinds of admin, not necessarily technical people using Google (although I would say >80% of the tech graduate emails I am given for contact past graduation are gmail which is a sign of the times!)
Need something to spread on social media? Fine. Post on Twitter, Facebook, Google, go nuts.
Never use Google (or other sketchy vendors) for anything you need to rely on to be there tomorrow.
Example: Youtube is fine for promotional materials. If you run an ed-tech and need videos to be there for students (core business), pay for something which works.
Example: Running a Black Friday promotion? Adwords. Relying on Google SEO for your main business as the main way to recruit customers? Bad idea.
You get one exception to this if you're building a Google-centric business. Is your business an Android App? You obviously get to use Android in your core business. If your business a Youtube channel? You get to use Youtube.
Things like Google Workspace, Google Cloud Platform, etc. are out. If, tomorrow, Google decides to wipe all you Google Workspace data (yes, it did this to a startup I was involved with), you're DOA. Office 365 is annoying compared to Google Workspace, but still worth it, since Microsoft won't wipe out your business as a statistic.
The way I think about this is each business has risks which multiply out:
(failed to execute technically) * (odds of market fit failing) * (odds of not being defrauded by your co-founder) * ....
This should multiply out to how likely your startup is to succeed. The way exponentials work, most of those risks need to be very, very low. You get one, maybe two, big ones. Every Google product in the core critical path has perhaps 10% odds of wiping out your business. Adopting Android is totally worth it if your business is Pokemon Go, but for most aspects of your business, pick trustworthy vendors.
But avoiding getting locked out of your account and having to post on HN to get any support from Google? Priceless.
I don't know if Zoho has great customer service, but I cannot imagine it is worse than google's.
Email aside, no CardDav/CalDav is a dealbreaker for me.
The question is about a Business Suite similar to the Google Suite. I don't think that Fastmail provides a Drive or Docs (as far as I know they have mail, contacts and calendar, right?).
Not to say that Proton is a perfect alternative: Proton Docs is pretty new and doesn't have the excel/powerpoint equivalents that Google has.
I will use google or any other service for building up an advertising presence. And keep the proton, until everything is moved. And then again, pragmatism might decide in favor of useing the proton service, but only as the core of my business is seperate,and will spread my add bucks around, so I feel safe. Currently have NO guggle anything, because of past denial of service, and will only use them for the advertising side as well.
Once you have more than one mailbox then its kinda the only way. So apple mail, thunderbird etc. And then you mostly get some quality provider mailbox.org, fastmail, infomaniak or whatever but its all the same.
I assume they mean they run their own server now.
Not sure what they mean, but at the very least I think you should have your own domain. So that you can migrate without changing the email address (and having to ask all your contacts to update to the new one).
Are you saying they made it so that you cannot send replies with less than one full line of text? I don’t think I’ve seen or heard of Proton doing that.
email wise whats cumbersome with proton is it tries to upsell me again and again with its add-ons.
on google workspace i can say the best advantage is how almost 90% other sites out there supports signing in with google. and it's also cheap at $6 per head, and it doesnt harass you with upsells unlike proton.
If that is truly how you feel then I pity the fools who give you their business.
Lots of people have directly stated otherwise. Are you super sure they're wrong?
And for this estimation, I’m really taking your word that migrating 50 people in an emergency is really going to take only a couple of days, which I honestly don’t believe.
Sure, if you get a business account for your solo business, a backup will save you. If you have more people or a non trivial Google setup, the backup recovery is it’s on challenge while you could be working on your business if they didn’t, in this hypothetical but very possible scenario, lock you out of your business tools.
I've used their calendar and email. The calendar has had issues over the past few months where it would revert unexpectedly and silently back to a previous date (like they reverted to backup but no notification), with all changes and appointments changed after that date being lost.
Some of the email features are very dependent on browser features where you can't set them manually for example timezones impact all visible dates among both apps, and are derived from the metadata of the client which don't update to the current date/time but to last visited time.
If you happen to be traveling, this can cause missed appointments/confusion when you do the mental gymnastics from your original timezone.
Personally, I don't think its ready for production requirements of business.
The fact that anyone who knows my phone number can know that I use signal does bother me.
- "Who can see my number". If you choose "Nobody", then your phone number will not be visible to anyone unless they have it saved in their phone's contacts.
- "Who can find me by number". If you choose "Nobody", then nobody will be able to see you're on Signal unless you message them or have an existing chat with them.
I believe that one big reason for that is that it was not trivial to get with the quality they wanted. I respect the fact that they "resisted" instead of just adding some bad implementation for the sake of it.
As long as you keep emailing within the Proton realm, there's not much risk of a data leak or foreign govt. intervention. Maybe a denial of service? Or why do you see this as a risk?
Personally I love that they explore more for businesses but as a full biz suite they're not quite there yet. Love their email and VPN though.
For extra email privacy you can still use proton on a separate domain or a subdomain https://bitcreed.us/bitblog/howto-protonmail-as-secure-whist...