Is Google Losing Too Much by Making Business Account All Paid?

I know this is not the most recent news that Google has removed the 10 free accounts from the “Business Account” area. And I am not against the charge-per-use cloud model either. But it just struck me that for all our other domains that we were running as non-profit, have quickly become very expensive at $50 per account per user for a year. For a company in a developing world with a strength of over 100 employees (which is not uncommon, given the cost of man power), it quickly becomes very expensive at $5000 per year. And if they do not use other services like Google drive, calendar, hangouts etc, it does not make economic sense at all. The alternatives of using services from other email providers become very lucrative at around $50 per year for unlimited email accounts. In any case, most small companies use Google accounts to access their emails only.

 Moreover, In the background of this service becoming all paid and the news that Google maps api is going to become paid soon, the image of Google being different from Microsoft, Apple and other corporate bigwigs have taken a beating. It appears that in the end, Google has just been trying to give you those freebies and get you hooked on them before everything becomes a paid service (What’s next: Maps, YouTube, Picasa, Plus,,,Search). Until now the Google brand for me had somehow been, for lack of a better word, different from others. But recent decisions have really got me thinking otherwise. Also, I think this has gotten Google bad press and the income generated through this is far less compared to brand damage it is causing.

 I think that it would be better if Google had gone the absolute cloud way, kept a few of the email accounts per business account free and kept adding a small amount for each additional service i.e., additional email account, G drive usage, hangout, calendar etc. This way, if a company is using the entire suite, they will not mind paying those extra dollars while the other can use bare minimum service for free/much less cost. Charging everyone a steep flat fee seems a little overdone.

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