Google takes the Free tier of Google Apps out into the street and shoots it

Because they're fucking stupid.

http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2012/12/changes-to-google-apps-for-businesses.html

I won't mind paying $50 a year too much if it means Google Contacts Sync will finally be available to me.

It's disappointing that they don't have the free version anymore (though nice that they're grandfathering in existing people for now), but honestly? $50 a year for that isn't a huge imposition either way.

I am a little concerned that they're positioning it more firmly for businesses now, and that there'll be even less interest in enabling new consumer-oriented stuff for it -- like how long it took G+ to be supported.

Huh? What possible reason did they have for supporting this product?

I think the case you can make for it is that it serves two markets:

1. Tech-savvy people who want to use their own domain. Instead of setting up with some IMAP provider, they're able to use GMail and all the other Google services, so Google gets a user community it wouldn't have otherwise gotten. (This is why I'm on there.)

2. Very small, cash-poor businesses who are highly attracted to free, and who might quibble at $50/employee/year and just stick with using their @yahoo.com account. I know at least one business that I was able to persuade to use Google Apps with the "free" as a major draw.

And if you ask why Google cares about having users who don't pay, the answer is that they all see ads, and they're just as valuable to Google as any other user they have.

I suspect Google's calculation on this comes down to believing that most of the businesses who are getting this for free would be willing to pay ($50/year for an employee is really not a lot of money), and the ones who wouldn't are just as likely to end up on Gmail as anywhere else; and maybe some of the tech-savvy people will pay too, but they're hardly a core market anyway, and are also just as likely to end up using Gmail one way or the other.

I wouldn't mind paying $50/year for some lite edition (say up to 10 accounts), but paying 50 bucks for each account is nuts. I'm talking about a bunch of friends sharing a domain kind of situation, not a business making money situation. My existing domain is grandfathered for now, but if I'm forced to run email servers again, I'll just might as well move everything off Google.