Well, that didn’t take long.
There is hope for users of Google’s “legacy” free G Suite accounts. Last week, Google announced a brutal policy change—it would shut down the Google Apps accounts of users who signed up during the first several years when the service was available for free. Users who had a free G Suite account were given two options: start paying the per-user monthly fee by July 2022 or lose your account.
Naturally, this move led to a huge outcry outside (and apparently inside) Google, and now, the company seems to be backing down from most of the harsher terms of the initial announcement. First, Google is launching a survey of affected G Suite users—apparently, the company is surprised by how many people this change affected. Second, it’s promising a data-migration option (including your content purchases) to a consumer account before the shutdown hits.
This migration option is all we’ve ever wanted, for years now. We’ve been asking Google over and over to give us this option, because those affected had seen the writing on the wall years ago. It highlights just how incompetent Google is at customer feedback that they were at all surprised by this in any way.
It remains to be seen if users can keep the email with custom domain on the migration or if users will have to adopt a new gmail address (and subsequently setup possibly fragile forwarding)
Seems pretty clear based on what I’ve read they’ll need to choose a different email address to use with google. Since they presumably own the domain of the email, then they could set up email forwarding which gmail handles pretty well. Not perfect for a bunch of reasons, but much better than not allowing the transfer of google associated data to a new account.
Thom Holwerda,
You finally got google to cave…Yay! Haha. I know google’s a lot of fans, but their support is some of the worst I’ve experienced.
This is O/T, but did anyone else notice the loss of the original osnews theme? We used to be able to revert the color scheme in our profiles, and the OSNews Account links are missing too.
Here’s a Before and After:
https://ibb.co/0spxg7Z
I had to guess at the login and RSS links and personally I preferred the original theme.
Are these changes intentional and if not is anyone looking at what happened?
Alfman,
Yes, this is actually good news. Customers being loud work. I can’t go into details, however the technical difficulty is really there for this migration.
On the OSNews theme… Maybe the users should also get loud to get the old options back…
sukru,
It would be really interesting to hear the behind the scenes story. Of course I realize you’re not necessarily at liberty to talk about everything. These kinds of stores usually come out when somebody retires and publishes a blog about it many years later. Maybe that could be you? Haha.
Yeah. Osnews doesn’t have the resources to do everything we want, but in this specific instance it seems like the change may have been unplanned, like a broken wordpress update or something.
Alfman,
(Carefully going over publicly available info)
It is not the work itself, but how it is performed is the reason I mentioned technical difficulty.
I goes without saying, but things in Google are redundant. Entire data centers are taken offline as regular exercises. And services chug along fine:
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/management-tools/shrinking-the-time-to-mitigate-production-incidents
So, there is no “pause” button. (Actually I expect there probably is one somewhere, but would be reserved for extreme emergencies). It is more like the story of the heart surgeon and the car mechanic.
Side info: There are some account libraries as part of public Chromium source code. Some of those might require refactoring.
https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/master:google_apis/gaia/gaia_auth_util.h
The light theme is still there, for me at least. Select “OSnews v6 Light” from the Theme Switcha in the WordPress Dashboard.
flypig,
So it is, thank you!
Nice,
I was looking at the wrong place. It worked… but I realized I am used to the dark option now.
Actually the theme switch no longer persists and my setting is lost every time I close the browser and loose the session even after logging back in. Personally I find black text on white background more comfortable to read and it worked perfectly prior to whatever changed this past week. Can someone from osnews acknowledge this and give an indication if it will be fixed?
The mechanics of organisations even small organisations can be hairy. I have one project underway and have already had someone try to invite me into a committee and dodge senior management being roped in as well as having to sign off on allowing for a delay to keep a regulator happy.
With another project concurrently underway with another organsiation I have managed to break every single policy they had because they weren’t wholly legally compliant, and badly documented, and badly designed and implemented. Or rather it was minimum effort works in theory but not always in practice. So that is fun. I also had to dodge being invited onto another committee by them too.
It’s orthogonal to the topic but a client told me he had been invited onto a committee by a person with a relatively high ranking public profile. The look on his face when I told him that was only being done to shut him up!
Data migration is a lot easier. In fact I’m puzzled why Google didn’t offer this as a first option. It’s also easier to fix and much cheaper than fighting a civil case which they were potentially facing. In fact lawyers experienced with these things had been reported as drawing up a case.
I personally found Google’s organisational structure and who filled what management roles more interesting than the actual technical issue. There is some really slimy stuff going on there with some very dodgy individuals.
You will not be able to keep your domain on the free account. It will become gmail.com.
Google is offering free until July and then 50% off for a year. That works out to about $4.00 Aus.
After that I might try zoho.com free account.
franko,
It’s easy enough to forward emails from your own domain to gmail, I do this for my brother. Sometimes you can even do this under existing hosting packages. People will do anything in order to avoid paying though, haha 🙂
https://c.tenor.com/mJZDMJWridQAAAAC/kermit-yay.gif
For what it’s worth: Google invites people who uses G Suite free for personal use to fill out a form (How do you use your G Suite legacy free edition account?). Guess what, you can’t fill out the form, because you have to log in with a Google account, and the account needs to have Google Docs enabled… Smart, or sloppy?
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSegYlPiZd5KKL6qSgV9CIEzN1pMO5i9d9spvUqG4chAm5zyMA/viewform