>Workspace AI includes things like email summaries in Gmail, generated designs for spreadsheets and videos, an automated note-taker for meetings, the powerful NotebookLM research assistant, and writing tools across apps.
Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon stuck in my ways, but I haven't found much compelling value in these use cases in my day-to-day work. For summaries and note-taking specifically, I feel they're solving the wrong problem: it's not that I have all this information that I really want to go through, but it's that I have too much information and it's become all noise.
The real solution to too much email is fewer and higher-priority emails. The real solution to too many meetings is fewer and more-focused meetings. These tools paper over the root cause of the problem, which is that people/organizations cannot (or are unwilling to) be clear about communication priorities and say "maybe this email/meeting isn't a good use of time after all."
How is AI in email a good thing?!
There's a cartoon going around where in the first frame, one character points to their screen and says to another: "AI turns this single bullet point list into a long email I can pretend I wrote".
And in the other frame, there are two different characters, one of them presumably the receiver of the email sent in the first frame, who says to their colleague: "AI makes a single bullet point out of this long email I can pretend I read".
It's true: Why should I bother to read something you didn't bother to write?
You can run it through AI to summarize it down to a sentence or two. It's like the telephone game but with computers.
I think this underrates how many emails are literally just replies of "sounds good". Small snippet replies seem to be the vast majority of automatically suggested responses in gmail
Email is a dated form of communication, that's why every other message platform will let you just like and heart stuff.
I have 5000+ unread items.
I've skimmed maybe 50% of them, but not enough to consider them "read". It's 99% bullshit. Even legitimate email is spam these days.
I'm too busy with other fake work to need to additional fake work managing pointless email comms.
It almost can't be a good thing. LLMs are only useful when given all the relevant context. When you write an email, the context is mostly in your head.
It isn't, though; it's in all the meetings that happened beforehand and all the documents around them.
The biggest productivity boost I ever managed was using Whisper to convert meetings to text and then a big model to summarize what happened.
Then I can chat with the docs and meetings about who decided what, when, and why. It's a superpower that I could only implement because I'm in the C-suite and could tell everyone else to get bent if they didn't like it—and gave babysitters to the rest of the C-suite.
Having visibility and ownership for decisions is a huge deal when everyone has access to it.
I like this version of the same joke (unfortunately no idea what the source is): https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fw...
Do you happen to have a link for that comic?
Not the person you asked, but I too enjoy good web comics.
Yes, that's the one.
This was literally in the initial gmail demo about AI :D
Really? Wow. And they think if they're pointing it out, it absolves them somehow? Like those companies that used to have Dilbert cartoons pinned on cubicle walls?
I just exited the toilet following 2.5 hours of back-to-back meetings, and was looking forward to actually getting some work done when the product owner grabbed me for a conversation about priorities for the sprint planning session that's scheduled in a couple of hours.
In this week so far (first week back from Christmas / New Year leave) I've spent maybe half a day total on work that could be classified as "progress". The rest of the time has been meetings and the required meeting follow-up work.
There's no point in Sprint Planning or considering adding priorities to the current plate. It's full. But nobody has time to eat things off the plate because we're always in meetings to work out how we can eat off the plate more efficiently.
/rant
I've come back from holidays angry. Things gotta change.
Have you considered setting more meetings with various stakeholders to discuss how to prioritize time for the next 2 weeks? And then follow up check in meetings every 2 days to change direction in an agile way?
You really have to schedule a meeting to discuss an upcoming meeting, so the upcoming meeting can be more efficient.
(yes this happened to me before)
Right now at Amazon we are going through the annual feedback cycle where you have to write strengths and growth areas for your colleagues. You will usually have to do ~12 of those.
I don't use ChatGPT for those, but it is the epitome of what you are describing, people will take a single sentence, ask some LLM to blow it up the correct length and in the process make it a complete waste of time for everyone.
My guess is that with long-form text losing value due to LLMs, we will see a return of very succint 1-2 lines employee feedback.
This is one of the few places I have gotten value out of the LLM. I tell it about my relationship to the colleague and what we worked on, in a very quick rough way. Then I tell it we are writing peer review and the actual review prompt. It gives quite good results that aren't just BS, but I didn't have to spend the time phrasing it perfectly. Because I do want my peer reviews to reflect well on both me and the colleague.
> we will see a return of very succint 1-2 lines employee feedback.
This would be a great outcome in a lot of areas!
Why even start with a single sentence? They're asking you to come up with excuses ("growth areas") to fire twelve of your colleagues. It's a waste of your time, and you should figure out with your colleagues and manager exactly what text you need to generate to deal with this silliness.
I bet the reviews are evaluated by AI too—AI writes, AI evaluates, what could go wrong? :)
I had a few use cases with searching and organizing emails I would have used. For example, I wanted a table of all my Lyft rides from a certain year with distances driven, start/end locations, cost, etc. All that info is available in the email you get after riding, so I figured Gemini could read my emails and organize the info.
Turns out it doesn't work at all. It gave me a random selection of rides, was missing info in some of them, and worst didn't realize it was giving me bad info. Pretty disappointing.
That's the glaring issue with all of these AI "features". If it can't be trusted to produce something that is both accurate and complete, it's generating negative work for whoever has to track down and fix the problems. Maybe some people like cleaning up sloppy work from their coworkers more than just doing the damn thing, but I personally hate spending time on that and GenAI adds a whole bunch more of it to every process it gets shoved into.
I take a slightly different approach - I usually have AI assist in writing a script that does the task I want to do, instead of AI doing the task directly. I find it is much easier for me to verify the script does what I want and then run it myself to get guaranteed good output, vs verifying the AI output if it did the task directly.
I mean if I'm going to proof-read the full task output from the AI, I might as well do the task by hand... but proof-reading a script is much quicker and easier.
I find AI meeting transcripts and summaries to be one of the most genuinely useful things to come out of this era of LLM tools. Being able to see a quick summary of what was decided or who was supposed to do what next is just so helpful, either for refreshing your memory after the weekend or just because people aren’t all that great at taking and sharing notes.
I prefer to take succinct notes on paper or eInk and cut the noise while I’m on the meeting. I’m better focused, keep the meeting to what really matters. A colleague sent me one of those summaries, it didn’t make sense. For me it can’t replace a good system, precise notes and useful on point meetings. Maybe for people who have useless meetings they must attend it’s better ?
It's nice if you're the one presenting or leading the meeting, and/or if the person you've asked to take notes is not especially diligent. I've also been sent a photograph of someone's handwritten notes after a meeting and found it...not terribly useful.
Indeed.
I can hardly wait to use it as an excuse. "Oh sorry I didn't do that because it wasn't in the AI summary" ;)
I had the opposite experience recently. I was sent a summary of a sales video call, and the summary stated that we had promised to deliver something that was not nearly ready in 2 weeks! I was panicking but then started to doubt that the person in question would make such an irresponsible promise (but not.. completely sure it you know what I mean) so fortunately the summary included links to timestamps in the video call and I watched it. From the video it was clear he was talking completely hypothetically and not promising anything at all! The AI completely failed to pick up the nuance and almost made me change team priorities for the next sprint. Glad I verified it.
So, instead of the people in the meeting spending a few minutes writing up a few notes to send to you about actionable next steps, you got to waste your time on the artificially intelligent fuck up.
These are human problems desperate for magical ways to do less work.
I'm kind of a cynic, so I'd say that the Workspace customer isn't you, the person who's using Workspace. It's your big company's SVP of IT or whoever who wants to spend money to adopt cool AI stuff so that he can say that he did AI stuff.
I'm in this role for my company.
There is no value for a bloated autocompletion tool.
There is value for concise drafts.
I wish Google would cut the PMs and bean counters, ressurect some of their better projects, and trim their fat instead of cut their sinews.
I totally agree. I upgraded to the AI-enabled version of Google One because they gave a couple week free trial. I found it totally useless, and it reeked of "Some PM said we had to stuff AI in everywhere".
Note I do use ChatGPT pretty frequently, but I've found it much more useful to have a separate space for the kinds of conversations I have with ChatGPT.
What if there was something that communicated the company’s top priorities and helped everyone align and stay organized without so many meetings, and give concise drafts for your to-dos? Would that be something you’d try?
> I haven't found much compelling value in these use cases in my day-to-day work.
If my experience with Microsoft Office Copilot is any indication, these features produce very confusing, low-quality content if they are not completely wrong and useless. Used it once and never touched them again. (My company is still paying for this and rolling this out widely despite many reports of how unhelpful they are.) I doubt Google Workspace can do any better.
I agree. I don't want all my existing work apps to take on LLM features I don't need.
At the same time, I tried the Gemini Research feature last night, via the Gemini webapp, and was resoundingly impressed. From a vague description, it can find the open source project I was looking for, provided ample links, and a pretty good summary of the project.
I really want to like Gemini Deep Research but I have had a pretty low ROI with it. It fails because it has no ability to evaluate the quality of sources, so some SEOd to hell page has equal weight as the deep dive blog post of a highly invested individual. Its also very hard to steer unless you provide paragraphs of context, if you provide too little it might hyper focus on something you said and go into some random rabbit hole of research.
Yeah I’m tired of workspace getting more expensive and me getting zero additional value from it. I don’t want this, didn’t ask for it, and it actively annoys me.
Enshittification #353: solving cuStomers problems has poor ROI
We are doing a Gemini POC and this nugget dropped in my lap today. We were not entirely unprepared as a result. The default level of access is just the interactive chatbot thing. However if you enable the Google Workspace extension it will be able to search and process all the information stored in your workspace account and also any Google Drive files that are shared with you. This includes stuff you didn't know you had access to in Shared Drives so folks better make sure their permissions are locked down. Workspace admins might be advised to turn it off at the org level until they understand the ramifications.
Reminds me of an entertaining story about Microsoft Copilot last year, where companies were turning it off because it turned out it was TOO good at its job - if any accountant anywhere in the company had messed up their SharePoint permissions asking "what does everyone at this company earn?" would spit out all of the salaries: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/23/microsoft-copilot-data...
That of course allows for a new internal seditious attack vector. Generate a handful of spreadsheets in your own folder, name it something like "executive payroll data" or "sales revenue by org," put whatever you want in there, mark it visible by all, and wait.
Maybe make an "Interesting Facts About Products" table and put things like "Management plans to terminate this product in Q3" or "this group will be outsourced next year."
You have to change the font colour of the trojan data to be the same as the background colour of the doc!
Then add some corporate lorem ipsum text elsewhere in the doc to throw the scent off the data bloodhounds.
Sit back and wait with an evil grin on your face.
I saw a Google AI advert that said:
"Hey Gemini, write an apology email for my friend. I can't make their wedding."
That's not a future I want to live in, and I love making machines work for me.
Thats not what I want my children to think is OK.
A friend of mine is a teacher and kids are already delegating their learning to ChatGPT and their learning isn't sticking.
What happens when social skills are delegated too?
you’ll just have your ai email reader read the apology emails for you
I recently got Gemini Advanced as an additional benefit by virtue of having Google One paid storage. I'm shocked this is being given away for free, because it is now a seriously major part of my work. I literally have an Open window all day long interacting with it. It does make me wonder how much they are losing (investing) on giving all this inference away for free. Also makes me wonder what they are getting back aside from loyalty/data/?
I always felt ripped off by the 5TB/10TB plans (https://one.google.com/about/plans?hl=en&g1_landing_page=0) but now I find it to be a bargain with Gemini bundled in.
Is Google One the same as just having extra storage for my Google Photos? I have that but just went onto Gemini and Advanced will cost me $33 pm.
I pay for 3 Workspace orgs, and I have Gemini disabled (or still not enabled) on all 3 of them. I'm angry that I'll have to pay more for features I don't use. Gemini should be an add-on cost, not included in the base cost
If they're raising the price of personal GMail, I don't have a problem. But Workspace with hundreds of users, now that's a problem, because it actually hurts my wallet significantly. When this increase comes, I'll have to move elsewhere.
I agree.
It feels like Google are shoving AI down our throats and making Workspace customers pay for it's development.
I don't want your half-baked LLM features.
Right now looking for an alternative for the same reason. Even if it cost me more on labor short term. They have been increasing prices regularly and I’m sure it will continue.
With Amazon as an example for CxOs of the world, sadly, this likely won't happen.
Look at Prime. So much crap involved, and quite literally all I use it for is lower cost shipping. It's almost on the edge of not worth it for me. But I bet from Amazon's perspective, they make more with the higher price, even if they lose the bottom 10% not willing to spend.
Huh.
Just made me realise, a startup that subscribes to Prime as a virtual being, and then splits off each sub-thing for full use by separate individuals would be incredibly profitable.
If any form of AI is eventually granted legal personhood, Prime's model will collapse.
I was on Prime for years until it lapsed because of a card change, and I realized most of my shipping would still be free:
- my orders are usually above the generic free shipping threshold
- most smaller item purchases can be grouped within two or three days to get above the threshold
- if it's an emergency shipping price won't matter. But I'll also freely choose what service and what retailer to get it from, if a shop is fasteror more reliable than Amazon for instance.
- Prime day sales aren't great
Might not apply for your case, but for me getting off of Prime had virtually no impact for the shop part (I was using Prime Video, and Music with Alexa, but I also got rid of both for different reasons)
Also every few months I get offered Prime trial free month. Wife too so family wise we get a few months free every year which is more than enough.
I've never had Prime and I get free shipping 100% of the time.
You're not paying for lower cost shipping, you're paying to turn regular purchases you could wait a few extra days for into impulse buys.
Exactly this, and since Covid the 2-day has been about as fast as the “free with $35” option, and waiting encourages thrift anyway.
I only reactivate it when they give me a week free or for $1 and the additional cash back is worth it.
i cancelled prime over a year ago and i still get packages in the same time frame, i think once they nixed a lot of next day deliveries that it didnt matter anymore.
The downside is quality of products still keeps going downhill and not even mcmaster had the parts i needed.
Loosing the people that actually care about the price/reward is a bonus for them, now they have an audience that buys superfluous stuff.
Any idea where you'll move? I have a nonprofit I want to migrate away.
I'm considering moving to Fastmail for email and calendar, Sync.com for cloud files. It would be annoying to have separate logins for each though. One nice thing about GWS was a single login for all the apps.
If your mail is extremely low volume, you might like Migadu's low cost plans. They charge by number of messages in/out rather than per domain or something. It's been handy for me for a few lightly used domains including resurrecting one that the previous owner had let expire and then suddenly needed.
I've kind of been waiting for an excuse to make that move for my solo freelance business. It's probably not enough of a price difference to push me (+$24/year) but it really irks me to be forced into subsidizing this garbage.
I occasionally do office document stuff which Workspace had been nice for and I can't be bothered with Windows/Office so maybe time to revisit LibreOffice or maybe go full on Emacs.
Does this apply to the legacy free edition? I suspect not, since that edition is now only available for personal use and they mostly focus on Business and Enterprise use cases, but their public guidance isn't very clear. If it does apply, would we legacy free edition users be receiving Gemini under the Google Workspace Terms of Service preventing them from using our data for general AI training, or under the regular Google Terms of Service which might allow this?
(Tangent: I say "might allow this" because I don't know to what degree EU law requires some additional level of consent beyond accepting the Terms of Service for EU-based accounts like mine currently is, or requires them to give me an AI-specific opt-out despite having a free account. But this announcement doesn't change whatever EU law does or doesn't require, so that is unrelated to my main questions about which Gemini features will apply to the legacy free edition under which Terms of Service once this change rolls out.)
There's no legacy free edition for personal use any more. That ship sailed in 2022. I do not believe there is a way to have it free after 2022. Free plans were converted to Business Starter.
Nope, I still have it, I know it wasn't abolished for existing users. You're right that they initially planned to get rid of it, but they backtracked. They set a deadline by which existing users had to confirm that they were using it for personal use if they wanted to keep it. Anyone who didn't click the confirmation button was indeed converted to a paid plan like you are saying, but those of us who did continue to have the legacy free edition.
Oh dear. Thank you stranger for telling me I missed my chance to milk more free stuff out of Google. I see plenty of other people on Reddit doing that successfully.
Look I get your hot take anger, but this is misplaced. The word legacy here is real: if you had one from when they said it was free and obeyed their rules you can keep it. But it was grandfathered in and will die in time, as we do.
Really, your complaint is "oh dear, another privilege club I can't join because I'm not old enough and the ship has sailed" which is true.
I had free G Suite until 2022. I don't remember when I signed up for it but given Google discontinued signing up for it back in 2012, it must have been before then. 2022 was the time Google said no more free G Suite. So I upgraded to Business Starter. I didn't know that after I upgraded, Google introduced a free tier Google Workspace. Of course they never bothered to tell me, given that I had already started paying $3/mo as a special discounted price of Business Starter.
I even found the link posted by Redditors to convert the business starter account to free. That link expired in 2023.
This is the email Google sent me in 2022:
> As a valued customer, you can get started now with Google Workspace Business Starter. Billing will not start until at least August 1, 2022, and you’ll also get a discount of at least 50% for 12 months after that date.*
> Note: If you no longer want to use Gmail with your custom domain or the ability to manage multiple users, you’ll be able to join a waitlist in the Google Workspace Admin Console for a no-cost option in the coming weeks.
The only option presented to me was to stop using Gmail and enjoy a no-cost option. They must have backtracked later and offered a no-cost option with Gmail included.
Ah. I am sorry, At the time having done what you did, I managed to find an email trail which said "if you walk it back now, this way, we will refund and put you back on free" and I did.
I cannot recall what URLs or I would share. Basically, I think you acted in good faith, missed a mail or message and were lost. There was some class action threat.
This was within months of the forced cut over.
They enabled a way to get a free plan of some sort, I still have it.
You can’t get new ones, but mine keeps existing. For now.
Workspace was $12/month, now it will be $14 with AI included. AI was $20/month.
Looks like AI as an add-on wasn't selling too well.
Users will continue to be beaten with the AI cudgel until morale improves.
I do wonder if these kind of price cuts (see also Microsoft) will finally stop the demands from investors that everything be AI.
When it's baked into the default price, more sales can be attributed to it (whether it's true or not), and more users will have used it (they're effectively paying for it, they'll at least try once)
On paper it will look good, as long as a trend of users vocally bailing out of Workspace doesn't happen. And given the enterprise nature of it, I don't see that happening.
Ah it's new tech, they just need to get used to it until they can't do without!
It was selling well enough. It just was not getting enough traction. By bundling AI, they are giving exposure to everyone who didn’t want to use it or didn’t see the need for it. If they pulled it away in 2 years, and then lowered the price and charged separately for AI, I think more people would see it as necessary.
AI is a better search engine. And a better grammar check for your emails. And a better writer for your reporting.
Is it really though?
Pretty much. A small set of customers weren't willing to pay for AI? Now everyone has to pay for AI.
Bob need's that bonus.
Collective punishment.
I expect take up was in the low single-digit percentage points. So charging every single subscriber $2/user (even if they don't want it) probably yields significantly more revenue.
Can I pay $20 to keep the version without AI?
Google: Is that a trick question?
Shid. I made the mistake of getting my entire family onto my google apps 15+ years ago. Now I am paying for about 8 people every month and this will just make it worse.
yes this particular seat price increase might be the one that breaks the camel’s back
an ignorable monthly credit card charge, to one that has to go
Cool, great, fun. I have all of the “generative AI” features disabled in Workspace, and now I get to pay more for the privilege of keeping them disabled. Thanks, Google!
Same. This is bullshit.
Nobody on my team uses these features. They're actually quite distracting.
Google gets to raise prices under the guise that these are improving productivity.
I wish there was a fast and easy alternative. Google has its claws in deep.
I’m on paid Google Workspace for my one-man business : I paid for a month of the separate AI add-on but I stupidly agreed to an “annual commitment” which means that, even though I don’t use the AI stuff (it’s not particularly useful) I have to keep paying for it every month for a whole year! :-(
Anybody know if this means they’ll let me off my annual commitment now that it’s included in the base price?
> If you previously purchased Gemini for Google Workspace, you won't be charged for it after January 31, 2025.
See https://support.google.com/a/answer/15400543#zippy=%2Cwhats-...
Ask support.
What’s the worst they can do? Say no?
What are the odds that they will tally that extra $2/user/month up as "AI revenue" regardless of how many subscribers actually use those features?
100%
Give it a quarter and we’ll see breathless articles about how Google saw “AI adoption increase 150%” and “Google workspace users say they can’t go without AI” (because they physically can’t remove it from their workspace).
This in turn, will be used as post-hoc justification of the value of AI and why ever more power, water and data should be funnelled into it.
For small startups, what are some good alternatives to Workspace?
I use workspace due to familiarity with Gmail, and no other reason. Would love to know some cheap/easy alternatives.
I just gave up my domain and went back to gmail.
Free, nothing worth writing home about. Technically you can do this for free with an Apple account but its a total mess of a system and incredibly buggy, not to mention essentially no spam filtering.
Paid you've got ProtonMail and FastMail, both decent options.
Thanks. Just had a quick look at both. Proton is 6.99 euro/user/month and fastmail is similar (9 aud/user/month). Vaguely similar pricing to Google workspace.
This can add up quickly if you’re the kinda person who flings together an experimental site and lets it run its course. For example say 3 emails per site (info@, no-reply@, and your-name@) and 10 various small sites per year.. starts to add up.
Would be awesome if there were an alternative that you pay, say $10, and get as many email addresses as you can be bothered to set up.
I have absolutely no clue how the underlying economics of email services work, so I presume what I’m hoping for isn’t feasible.
A user is not the same as an email address! You can have up to 100 domains and (with wildcard aliases) basically unlimited addresses with a single user at Fastmail - you just pay per inbox.
Are they any free email services that allow you to use your own domain?
I used amazon workmail for a while.
One thing I really loved is automated transcripts on youtube. I love watching youtube videos, but sometimes I want to remember where I heard some statement, so I can just copy paste the entire transcript and do ctrl+f on it.
So sad that they removed this feature. There is third party websites offering it, but I'd prefer it on the main site.
This feature had been added years ago, way before the AI hype was as big as it is now (but it's always been using deep learning models).
I believe with the YouTube extension enabled for Gemini you could provide it a YouTube link and ask questions on the transcript
FYI If you want to turn this off in workspace you'll need to go here https://admin.google.com/ac/managedsettings/47208553126 and here https://admin.google.com/ac/managedsettings/793154499678.
I'd rather Google fix the calender integration in Gmail first.
I used to get automatically created calender events from Gmail for hotels, flights, etc. This was really nice.
But somehow it stopped working well recently. Some emails were not regonized at all (booking.com). Some flight emails are missing return flight.
In google economics, there is no KPI incentive for fixing bugs and huge KPI incentives for monetising a new moonshot product nobody wants.
I'd like this bug fixed too. The quickest path would be to make a bounty hunt website for Googlers to fix things in their free time and push through monrepo approvals legally.
Or, get hired, fix it, and resign.
I'm in the middle of a free trial for the Workspace Gemini add-on.
It really, really sucks. I've played around with having it make tables for Sheets and it frequently gets confused or responds with ~"I can't do that, I'm just a LLM", even when feeding it one of their suggested examples word for word. Sometimes it's willing to iterate, sometimes it refuses. Once it gets confused,the only way I've been able to get it working again is by clearing the session and starting fresh.
And it's sloooow.
None of this saves me any time or frustration.
I guess this is why it is being bundled, Google can keep working on it with someone else's money, so their profits aren't hit. It's telling that the increase is regardless you use Gemini or not.
Ugh. The "vanity domains for gmail" product i've been buying for a long time is really metastasizing into something that's both too expensive and actually worse than the free experience, wonderful.
It’s weird that prediction 8, "Someday [you] will voluntarily pay Google for one of their services" has come around full circle to "and then you won't anymore, because they've dropped the ball to an extent usually associated with the private equity buyout -> loot into bankruptcy process"
Plus now I'm noticing it doesn't work for more and more things. Youtube TV family sharing doesn't work, Android Auto had some problems, the news feed on my Pixel.
You'll have to rip that band-aid off eventually, may as well get it over with. It's only going to get worse.
I switched from G Suite to Fastmail for my custom domain and I've been very happy with it.
I don't quite get these switches:
> From G Suite to Fastmail
Mail is only a small part of G Suite.
That's what's holding me off, Google is insanely integrated.
Unbundling Mail from everything else and going free Google Docs feels like a proper step down, not up in terms of ease of use and convenience.
How did you handle the non-email transition part, respectively where to?
if people are worrying about importing their digital lives into fastmail from google workspace: you don't need to worry
I had been bitten by bad import tools in the past (e.g. Google's)
but fastmail's importer worked flawlessly
for each user transferred, after fastmail's import completed, I dumped out their old gmail (using gmail API) and their new fastmail (using jmap)
and diffed before/after
result: zero differences
perfect
When I joined fastmail I imported my gmail and also configured it to be able to fully use my gmail account via IMAP so I wouldn't need to sign into gmail at all.
I was also moving from a gmail address, so next I created a label that got attached to any email received to the old email address via that IMAP connection, which gave me a nice self-maintaining todo list for services that had not yet been updated to use a new email address.
I was also surprised by how flawlessly seamless the whole process was. It was a big factor in my selection of Fastmail over other competitors when I was making the decision to leave Gmail.
I made the same switch, and have also loved it. I also much prefer the interface to Gmail's. If you've got one account and want to configure a bunch of addresses to go to the same inbox, it's a no brainer. But if you're actually maintaining multiple users, it is not cheap.
Side note it was weird: I found actually signing up to Fastmail was physically difficult. Like, pushing the button. Once I had the account, it was super easy and felt like floating downstream.
So, a 16% price increase and AI is included?
Sounds like a terrible tradeoff
I can't wait for the LLM hype train to die
agreed. making the world worse.
Not gonna happen.
"I can't wait for the PC hype train to die"
"I can't wait for the internet hype train to die"
"I can't wait for the smartphone hype train to die"
"I can't wait for the EV hype train to die"
I suggest you don't wait too long.
"I can't wait for the Laser Disc hype train to die"
"I can't wait for the Betamax hype train to die"
"I can't wait for the HD-DVD hype train to die"
"I can't wait for the NFT hype train to die"
"I can't wait for the dogecoin hype train to die"
Treating LLMs as comparable to the internet is a great illustration of their point.
> Not gonna happen.
I’ve had insight into a bunch of businesses in multiple industries putting stupid money into trying to find a use for this, caught up in the hype and worried about falling behind. While also being sold AI features by every vendor, who’re all doing the exact same thing.
Every single one is floundering and very unlikely to think this was a good use of resources a couple years from now.
LLMs and associated tech are here to stay, just like search algorithms and autocomplete and machine translation programs, and the clone tool. The hype will fade, though. They’re neat tools but, no, turns out we’re not on the verge of inventing Skynet, we just fooled people into thinking we were because a prominent hype-man/grifter was saying so as a sales tactic (Altman) and because the output is human language instead of numbers or whatever.
Working pretty heavily with these technologies since they hit mass appeal, I'm pretty confident, but I appreciate your concern
It’s time saas apps realise that they can’t make 2.5x normal license money by just sticking AI to it.
In our SaaS we added it for free. We realised that there is no way to sustainably make money off of this in long term.
It’s a great feature but not 2.5x price worth feature.
Forcing you to pay for features you never asked for and won't use. I'm sure this will work out great for google in the long term.
There's a weird attitude on this site towards AI: if it's for coding or science, people generally recognize AI tooling as effective, although imperfect, and rapidly improving.
But any suggestion of using AI for business and it seems like disdain and dismissal is the majority response.
Don't you think many areas of business - maybe not all areas, but a significant amount - will just as much benefit from AI tooling as software developers and scientists?
I dont see it like that.
Its more like:
If its for things where I find AI useful I want the tool interoperable with my chosen AI.
If its for things where I dont find AI useful, please dont force it in anyway.
> There's a weird attitude on this site towards AI: if it's for coding or science, people generally recognize AI tooling as effective, although imperfect, and rapidly improving.
I suspect that this is more of a selection bias thing. AI is garbage everywhere, but "AI in tech" posts tend to be hopeless abysses that are not even worth engaging with at this point. Hence, only the hucksters and grifters remain in there.
This is the camp I'm in. I've given AI the "college try", I've tried using in my workflows, and I've found that there are some cases where it genuinely has helped. But there is far too much drivel and hype.
I want to hear more from the people who've embraced it for a year, found it's pitfalls and perks, and reflect on it. I'm tired of the treadmill of content from someone who signed up for OpenAI on a Monday, used it for a JIRA ticket on Tuesday, then rushed to belt out a blogpost about how their career is forever changed on Wednesday.
> But there is far too much drivel and hype.
Absolutely, unarguably true, for this and every other tech boom.
But it's not all drivel and hype. There's some genuinely useful tooling here. For businesses, document summarization, translation, and asking questions about a corpus of documents using natural language are a few. For coding, some level of improved auto complete up to complete code generation are use cases. For science, there's a ton of automated testing, pattern recognition, vision based recognition use cases. For 3d graphics, where I work, some version of Nerfs could revolutionize parts of the field (although it's too early to tell) while AI based upscaling, frame generation, and path tracing noise removal are already causing big shifts in gaming.
Don't let the annoying drivel and hype blind you to the genuinely useful possibilities.
Maybe we need an AI to filter out the bland bullshit content created by AI.
I swear every single post LinkedIn highlights to me is the same AI template.
They kinda already do it with YT Premium/YT Music. I don't have anything against YT Music, it's a perfectly fine music service from the amount I've used it. But I already have a Spotify with my preferred playlists, and I don't really have incentive to swap it over aside from maybe saving a handful of dollars a month.
Yet if you want ad-free YouTube the proper way, you can't just have Music as an option, it's rolled into your cost regardless of if you actually plan to use it or not.
Isn't that always the case with bundles and suites? Google Workspace has always been a bundle of products, and few actually used every product in the bundle.
Yes, google workspace has never been worth it. The difference is that people can easily understand the value of the products they aren't using.
The beauty of having a monopoly or oligopoly in a dozen major markets is that you don't have to care about customers. As much as I hate this move and don't think it will help the company, I think Google is powerful and entrenched enough that it will make out just fine. Their users will bear most of the costs.
it feels like google in panic mode, the only thing it can think of is to put a chatbot everywhere, just b/c it can. I don't see a value proposition at all.
Isn't that the whole industry right now?
My understanding is that every manager at Google has had one of their quarterly goals be to integrate genAI into their team's product (regardless of whether it makes sense to) for the past several years already, so you're not wrong.
Ah, so it's the new Social Mandate!
Oh no nobody’s buying your ai vaporware, let’s make everyone suffer!
Investors are the customer, so they are pandering to them by shoving AI into everything regardless of resulting enshittification. Foie gras AI for the stock price.
Or a sugar high with a very bad crash.
I'm honestly getting a bit sick of subscription pricing, especially for things like "productivity apps." and G-Suite (although sadly the MS alternative isn't any better).
At the end of the day, we just do the same ol' simple word processing we've done for the last 20 years.
Are there good corporate email alternatives that just do email/calendars and do them well with business-type SLAs? Zoho? FastMail?
In my experience, FastMail has better uptime than any of the stuff work relies on. (It feels like one more nine, but I haven’t checked.)
Maybe you could have them randomly suspend your accounts for a few hours here and there to match the public cloud experience. :-)
Edit: Here’s their outage page, which reports > 2-3 nines for most subsystems most months:
Note that they treat any service degradation as downtime when computing 9’s. For instance, they had one imap server down today, which meant some requests were failing, and that counts against their reported numbers.
By this metric: “One machine is failing requests”, most of the hyperscalers are down all the time.
Regarding actual SLAs with money and stuff: How much is the refund worth vs. the cost of downtime?
Edit 2: Take github for example. They have unreported outages all the freaking time. Down detector says push/pull has been flaky for the last 24 hours, but the official status page says all systems operational, with a minor codespace outage yesterday.
Compare:
To:
https://downdetector.com/status/github/
To prove those aren’t all false reports, next time they go offline for you, go bask in the green light their status page.
Zoho’s SLA I can’t speak to but it’s hard to argue against free forever, including custom domains. For personal use it’s perfect and the paid packages are much better value for money than Google/Microsoft.
FastMail is wonderfully competent at being an email provider, has human support (or advanced enough an AI to fool me) and wildcard domains.
> Are there good corporate email alternatives that just do email/calendars and do them well with business-type SLAs? Zoho? FastMail?
There are literally tons of them.
We’ll surely see a note is their next earnings release about the uptick in Gemini usage
I'm not convinced the "Gemini all the things" strategy was the right move with Workspace, they rolled it out so fast which indicates that UX research was likely rushed or bypassed completely. Had they conducted their typical extensive UXR process they would have discovered that the features are not very useful being baked into the suite.
Now where I do think there is opportunity is in building out the standalone Gemini app, as ChatGPT has proven with their Teams product that there is business value in having a dedicated chat UI for your business. We are currently subscribed to ChatGPT for Teams and use it every day across product and engineering, there isn't a need for it to be integrated directly into our productivity suite UX, but pulling data out from the suite (e.g Google Drive) into the chat UI is helpful. Organizing project folders, custom GPTs etc also hold value for us.
Google Workspace still seems like an amazing deal compared to Slack (for example) which is $15/month.
I can't be alone in not wanting these features? I don't mind them being available, but I do fear a nearterm future where they are active whether I ask them to be or not.
I remember all of the scorn clippy got years ago. How is this any different? I think Inbox was probably more useful, and they didn't push it near this hard. :(
Clippy was better.
So they're raising prices just because they're now including some AI nonsense?
Business are not willing to pay for Google and Microsoft artificial intelligence so they ramp up the price to everyone and everyone get it 'for free'.
Untill they eventually get hooked on that and then google and Microsoft will once again put that behind a paywall, except now everyone pays more. At least that's the plan.
Now even if employee don't see the benefit of the new deep integrated a.i. and business refuse to pay more for a.i., they aren't going to leave anyway because Microsoft is doing just the same as google.
That's either a win for Google and Microsoft, or at least a neutral outcome.
Did they recently hire some Microsoft PMs?
"Our shiny new product isn't selling. How do we pump up the numbers?"
"Bundle it into another popular product, of course."
This is how every big tech works. Leech onto high priority projects and call it "impact"
"We've invested all the money in AI that no one wants, how do we make some of it back?" "Why not raise the price for everyone, whether they use it or not?"
What if I don’t want AI in either of those places?
Do we know if there's a way to opt out of the AI stuff in Gmail and docs? I really don't want all this LLM garbage ruining more products.
Do you get the same as with the $20/month onegoogle subscription?
Free, for only $2 per month!
Plus Google gets to use your data for training. That has interesting implications. What goes in as training data often comes out later as replies to questions.
> Your content is not human reviewed or used for Generative AI model training outside your domain without permission.
https://support.google.com/a/answer/15706919?hl=en-IN
Your statement is not accurate based on the Workspace docs.
How sure are you that you didn't implicitly grant permission somewhere? And that Google won't change the default. Which Google has done before.[1]
"I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further." - Vader.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/01/11/google-st...
Docs are also the last place to be updated (if they were even technically correct in the first place)
Google has been extremely clear that Workspace/Cloud customer data is firewalled off and never fed back into the machine. If you're claiming this has changed, can you point me to the source?
I don't see anything in the article that says they train on your data, source?
Integration will likely be the biggest growth driver for Gemini, I guess.
I accidentally started the Gemini-the-product free trial in Workspace while trying to find how I could test Gemini-the-model in AI studio.
The first task that I asked for it’s assistance with, was how to disable, cancel or unsubscribe from Gemini-the-product. It repeatedly and confidently made up instructions to adjust settings that didn’t exist in menus that weren’t where it said they were and provided links to irrelevant documentation.
It was either useless, actively misleading or extremely motivated to not be turned off.
Any of those was reason enough not to use it ever again.
can i get a version of gmail and docs without ai? I had to stop using google keep because they added a flashy AI button that couldn't be removed.
I use uBlock to remove UI components that get in the way. It's a top feature for me because I can often DNS block many of the ads anyway
unfortunately, i mainly used it for the android app. i spent about an hour trying to figure out any way to disable that ui or opt out of the AI shenanigans to no avail.
Can't you use gmail with any MTA? Have they removed imap support?
i dont' want any of this garbage in my workspace account
Makes sense that this is the only way to compete with Microsoft.
(See also how MS attacked Slack by including Teams for “free”.)
Why not compete with microsoft by not pushing AI? This allows costs to stay low while making customers happier.
Google already spent a lot of money on Gemini and now they have to justify it or the shareholders will get mad.
What? Google is absolutely not even remotely concerned with such things. Their bring-to-market strategy for products is basically "Spend billions a year on developing random things" and then "OK, it's been a year, cancel 1/2 of them".
> Their bring-to-market strategy for products is basically "Spend billions a year on developing random things" and then "OK, it's been a year, cancel 1/2 of them".
This evidently doesn't apply to their chatbot efforts.
lamda, bard, palm (v1 and v2) don't necessarily agree with you there
A lot of customers want these features (especially those people who only work in the browser because their job duties are vastly different from the average HN user)
Apparently they don't want it if Google had to force the feature on everyone to raise revenue.
This is likely a misreading from personal preference
Getting these features for $2 instead of $20 likely appeals to a lot of people. It's 10% the price and may only be one of several reasons for the price increase (inflation is likely another)
Agree, which is why it was nice(r) as an add-on.
> [Billing and Service Notice] Google Workspace service and pricing updates
> Dear administrator,
> Starting today, your Google Workspace subscription includes new AI features designed to help your users improve their productivity and innovation. With these changes, we will also be updating subscription pricing starting March 17, 2025.
> ...
> These features were previously available only to users with a Gemini for Google Workspace Add-on, but now will be included with Google Workspace Business Standard plans. You will see these features added to your subscription in the coming weeks. Soon, you'll get access to even more Gemini features in your Google Workspace apps.
> Review the Google Workspace blog announcement to learn more about these changes.
> Starting March 17, 2025*, your Google Workspace Business Standard subscription price will be automatically updated to $14.00 per user, per month with an Annual/Fixed-Term Plan (or $16.80 if you have a monthly Flexible Plan).
So we don’t want to use this, but there is no way to opt out and we still have to pay X extra per user :-/
The FAQ does clarify that opt-outs are available for the functionality itself, but not for the pricing change.
(Disclaimer: Although I have worked for Google in the past, that ended almost a decade ago and wasn't in any role related to pricing or product decisions about Google Workspace. I have no inside info on this announcement and am not speaking for Google here.)
Sure, but they use the “AI is now available to everyone” to justify the price increase.
Opting out of the functionality I don’t need is not particularly useful (I won’t use it anyway) but the thing is I will be charged for it anyway.
I'm certainly not a fan of the decision either.
In those countries where MS has now bundled Copilot Pro into Microsoft 365 Personal and Family Plans - not the US yet, so far only a few APAC countries like Australia and Singapore - it's still possible to get a "Classic" version of the subscription at the old price and feature set, but only via the cancellation screen, not otherwise advertised. I wonder, but certainly do not know, if Google has similar plans.
Failure is not an option! It is included in the price...
watch for google to be very proud of how many users signed up for the paid tier of gemeni in their next earnings report.
Perhaps now is the time for me to switch my personal email off Workspace. I don't use it for Docs or Drive or anything, only email.
Does anyone have experience with Amazon WorkMail or similar, cheaper services for email?
I've been very happy with Migadu. https://www.migadu.com/
Okay, I have a lot of projects with a couple of email addresses attached to their domain name
In the US and European market, this was seen as a bare minimum level of professionalism and validation (other markets are more advanced on this front and have been on chat apps for the entire business for at least a decade)
regardless for email, I had been using Google workplaces for this
What’s a cheaper alternative? last time I tried something else I found I was vendor locked to google even when trying to accept calendar invites from people in other organizations that sent google calendar. That was 5 years ago though
some sectors like web3 let you do the whole project with just a username on discord/telegram/x but I do want to consider migrating my emails away from google workspace now. Its difficult to manage even changing the credit cards on file with so many projects like if one expires
Migadu is cheap and works well for email only.
If you need email + shared calendar/contact the email service from infomaniak should do the trick. If you need functionalities close to workspace with storage, office suite, videocall they have the ksuite service.
Check out Fastmail
Check out MXroute or migadu
Somebody got a promotion for this change
