We use Google Apps for Business (the paid one), and the support we have had with that has been great. We even got Google to phone us and talk us through an issue we were having!
I'm probably the least fan of Microsoft in the world, but I have to agree with you on that. More generally, cloud products are extremely convenient on the surface, but beneath the water there is an iceberg of trouble.
Especially when you don't have your own backups of the data, as usual with these kind of services. Outages, unexplained data loss, services being shut down, users being locked out for unrelated reasons (oh you didn't put your real name in G+?), unexpected changes to the interface and software, the list goes on.
The vendor lock-in is even worse than when using closed-source software with DRM. At least you can keep running those (if necessary in an emulator) when discontinued, or reverse engineer them...
You left out the bit where Google invested massively in one of the few credible alternatives to Office, and forced Microsoft to reengineer their products to enable online collaboration. So, it's a step or two backwards on support and a leap forward on functionality and access (You can get fully functional Google Docs for free, just not on your own domain, Office 365 seems to be £80/year).
You can also get free Microsoft Office apps in SkyDive, which are actually better than Google Docs (and don't screw up your documents). These apps don't need an Office 365 sub.
Despite the name, Office 365 isn't really about Office -- you already have it -- it's selling web-based SharePoint and other services.
Try and listen to yourself. You sound really excited because you paid for their service, and even got to talk to an employee at the office when you had a problem. Think about if other companies would treat you like this, then good support would not be the word to use...
I have talked to support, and yes they tend to be quite crappy. I only know two companies doing it right. They're usually the underdogs on the market, providing the same service as their bigger competitors only much better and with better support. Xs4all is an ISP in the Netherlands, not one of the biggest but definitely one of the best. Spotify advertised so much that they worked Grooveshark out of the market, but Grooveshark's support is sublime and they're also cheaper than Spotify.
Most companies have "almost acceptable" support. You can talk to someone, they talk back, and most of the time (not always) they can solve your problem within 40 minutes of waiting on the phone and forwarding you to 6 others.
Then there are companies like Google and Microsoft. They deliver products, not support. Having trouble with Windows? Try talking to whoever delivered your pc. Not those who made the product and know everything about it, instead you talk to the person who sold you the system. That's like asking a 17-year-old working in a supermarket about why the doctor prescribed a product of theirs. Smart move by the doctor though, he makes way more money when you come in than when he explains his prescription to you on the phone.
In most companies you can access better support by paying more. The frustrating thing about Google is that they do not offer this option for most of their products.
In most companies, even the "better" support is utterly useless. And I'm saying that about cases where we were paying seven figure fees annually for that support.
We did consider Discourse and phpBB as migration options, but it seems there is no solution that will make everyone happy (there already is a forum in parallel to the mailing list actually). Many people like the mailing list concept and like to manage all this in their inbox.
Obviously switching to a self-hosted mailman is an option too. But having no access whatsoever to the group, migration is kind of a pain since you have no way of even contacting everyone that was subscribed.
I guess you mostly want to fix your current problem but if it's of interest in the longer term, we're building an email-based tool to not only handle the mailing lists but also help turn their content into documentation - http://copyin.com.
We're going to be rolling this out with a number of Rails and Android open-source projects and if you'd be interested in speaking it would be great to include you guys. If would be of help please feel free to contact me directly: peter dot nixey at copyin dot com.
If Starbucks invaded your city and used their cash pile to give away free coffee for years until there were no more independent coffee bars left, and then suddenly decided to close up shop leaving you with no decent coffee bars, would that make them evil? At least it would make them careless and insensitive.
A better option would be to a) charge a price and compete fairly in the first place, or b) open source or sell off the product so it could live on.
Assuming Starbucks coffee wasn't the crap it is, I'd be glad if they did so. New coffee bars can and would be opened once they left anyway, and until then, we'd get free coffee. Seems like an excellent deal to me.
In any case, "Starbucks" didn't prevent me from having some good homemade coffee for a few months now.
Not only that, but people would probably be wary of investing too much in a new coffee shop. After all, if Starbucks changed their mind so suddenly, what's to keep them from changing their mind again?
..or maybe Starbucks successfully pushed the consumers to some other way of consuming coffee (for instance hypothetical store-bought Starbuck espresso capsules)
So then it turns out that your small group doesn't matter as much as you think it did, and it turned out to be smaller than you thought. That is, as they say, tough.
Look, just because you want something to happen doesn't make it viable in the long term, and someone who demonstrated it was not viable in the long term doesn't become evil because they sped that process up. If they actually burned down all the other coffee bars in the process, that's one thing, but they didn't. They convinced folks to be satisied with something else.
You have literally just said "What if the remaining users are not enough to support a viable product I liked".
Then there aren't enough to support a non-viable product you liked, and that wouldn't be any different no matter how it happened. The only difference is it happened in 5 years instead of 50.
If the other way was still something that satisfied people, one would assume others would eventually revert to it.
All drugs have some set of side effects, and usually very badly effect some small percentage of the population that won't know until the take them.
Does this alone make releasing any drug evil?
If not, can we please just move the discussion along into social utility territory, instead of the "well, it hurt someone somewhere, so it's evil" stuff?
Contrary the misquoting a few parents up, the statement was "don't be evil" not "do no evil". This is an attempt to be guided by doing the right thing, not an attempt to ever avoid harming anyone. Basically, whether someone is being evil or not is not about you, it's about them.
I think there's a big difference between demonstrating that something is not viable in the long term, and some company killing off a business because it suits their particular business goals and they have the money to do it.
Consumer habits, laws and lots of other things can and are changed by businesses, and it's naive to think that all or even most of these changes are inevitable or for the better just because they happen.
I think it's to simplistic to ask whether a certain company is being evil or not. The discussion about what is evil and not isn't very relevant to someone who just lost their business because some algorithm tripped inside Google and nobody inside Google can help. It would be better if Google committed itself to more concrete promises about how to treat their customers and what not to do, and had independent audits to keep them honest. But as long as they are as dominant as they are, they'll never have to.
I think there's a big difference between demonstrating that something is not viable in the long term, and some company killing off a business because it suits their particular business goals and they have the money to do it.
Are you saying that Google created Reader eight years ago, with the only purpose of now killing it to somehow feed Google+? If they actually did so, then I'm in impressed by their long-term thinking, but I don't see how you can derive that conclusion. (And I'm further not convinced at all that killing Reader suits their business goals in any way, except for not having to waste manpower maintaining it)
No, I'm not saying that. I was thinking about the hypothetical coffee chain, and I'm countering his idea (from what he writes, that any market change that happens is "inevitable" and that businesses can merely accelerate or delay that change).
I don't think Google had any plans for Reader except that making Reader would be neat. And then they decided that killing it off would be a better idea. I'm certain that it's hurting their business long-term.
Google aren't closing their main product offering though (Search). A better analogy might be if they decided to give away little biscuits for free for many years and then one day stopped it... point being their main product is subsidising the other 'free' product as a way to get people to use Starbucks.
A real-life example might be their 'free WiFi'. They are well within their rights to stop doing this tomorrow if they choose to. Good luck to anyone who complains because their business is affected because they chose to base themselves out of a Starbucks!
So should free Internet sites be illegal? The NYT used to be free, now it's paid. Is that evil? Is HN evil for not charging?
Anti-dumping laws make sense when you're talking about hard goods with a concrete marginal cost of goods sold (like coffee.) Theydon't make much sense for web sites and software.
It's not about being free or not. You shouldn't operate with loss only to drive customers away from competition. That being said, I don't believe these laws should apply to online services. It's entirely different market. I was mentioning it because the example with Starbucks couldn't happen, thus it was a bad example.
"Evil" has special meaning with Google, since their unofficial motto in the early days was "Don't be evil." Which was an ironically hyperbolic way of saying "Don't be a dick." Which they often are these days.
This is why I don't understand why people use services like Google Hosted Libraries, it's a matter of time someone at Google pulls the plug or messes up breaking your website in the process.
The flipside is that companies, even ones as massively profitable as Google, should not offer free services.
Why isn't search meant? What about GMail? Millions and millions of people benefit from a simple, free e-mail account with world-class spam protection. Is this also 'simple'? You advice to all these people is that they should pay up or leave? Or should they just live with the risk that sometimes things change?
Here's the thing: Even paid-for services can end up being a nuisance that you want to divest.
This is a bit different to the Reader scenario. They're not shutting down Google Groups, they've shut down one particular group, without explanation. I think the symfony community would be happy if we could just get to the data to move.
I wouldn't say that they don't care. They certainly appear not to prioritise the customer, who when selling services should always be the single most important priority.
GoogleReader is best example, Google has actually become evil.
@fabpot Did you take a look at Discourse?