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Comment by hobo_mark | Hacker News Reader

It still strikes me how Google Apps users, who actually pay for GMail & Co., are always the last ones to get the new stuff.

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This is a source of frustration for me. I like the idea of Google Now, but as an Apps user, it is almost worthless as you cannot use Gmail cards. Gmail cards are the source of interesting things like flight status, package tracking, etc. Even more, I routinely have issues where upcoming appointments don't show up although I do not know if that is caused by being an Apps user.

I truly don't get the delay on both Inbox and Now - are the backend Gmail systems completely different? If it's just a worry that "enterprise won't like it," why not allow it to be turned on/off from the Admin console like so many other things?

My guess: data for their Apps customers are backed by completely different set of servers/infrastructure. This probably allows them to tell large potential customers that if GMail proper is ever hacked, their data would be safe (as it's part of some different system). It may also give them extra time to pen test new systems to make sure it isn't hackable before deploying it to the people that do trust it with their company's email.

That's feasible. It still strikes me as odd that even if Apps Gmail is indeed on different infrastructure that it would have a completely different API. All other Gmail clients (web,app,etc) work on Apps Gmail, in addition to vanilla IMAP.

I'd feel a lot better if they'd just explain what the hold up was, or if they don't plan on expanding to Apps customers. I'd be disappointed but at least I wouldn't be completely in the dark.

Apps Gmail is different, cause you can even get it self-hosted. Several larger companies actually use it self-hosted in-house without running it through google.

Well they test it on the free users, and give the Apps users a more stable version later.

Some things have just never arrived for paying customers. Such as Google Now for Apps users, which would make more sense for things like travel reminders as most of my travel is business related.

Google Now works for Apps users. It just has a limited feature set from what I gather, which is even weirder.

Why is it weird? You can't simply mine the private data of paying customers which is needed for Google Now.

Why not? They could just make it opt-in through the admin console like almost everything else that companies might not need/want (Youtube, G+).

They already allow Google Apps admins to control whether Google Labs or experiments are available, not to mention specific controls about the various other apps. This could be handled exactly the same way to allow domain admins to control whether users can use Inbox.

This is opposite from the way car companies do it.

They test new ideas and features on the luxury brands and then roll them out to the mass market brands later at lower prices.

Sundar says this is rolling out: https://twitter.com/sundarpichai/status/568479868427632640

Isn't there a checkbox in the Apps admin to opt in to get features earlier?

Yes, however that is just getting Google App features earlier. So if a product isn't in the GApps pipeline you won't get it, opt in or not.

Inbox has declared since day 1 they plan to come to GApps. No idea what the hold up is. They dodged my question asking about the challenges during the AMA. (I think they chose not to answer it at all)

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