For the past 11 months I’ve used Google Apps Premiere Edition and I’ve decided to abandon this paid service and move back to the standard Google apps offered for free. Let me start off by saying it isn’t a money issue.

I’d gladly shell out the $50/year if I believed the service was worth it, but that’s simply not the case. The purpose of this post is to provide full disclosure for folks considering switching to Google Apps (paid or free versions) so they can make an educated decision.

Reason #1 – Customer Service

If you’ve ever used any Google product for an extended period of time, you’ll eventually find out that it’s nearly impossible to get in touch with a live body within Google for customer support purposes. Don’t get me wrong, most of what Google offers is 100% free so expecting a 1-800 number and a friendly Googler on the other end isn’t realistic. That said, Google Apps Premiere Edition is quite different. Google presents this product as an enterprise-ready application with 24-hour customer support for paying customers. Unfortunately, Google does not offer what I would consider a reasonable level of responsiveness or availability. You can only call their support line with mission critical issues such as application failure or inaccessibility. Everything else is supposed to be sent via an online request form. My experience has been that the responses are slow (24 hours or more) and less than helpful, especially if the issue is not considered to be a high priority to the Google engineering team.

Reason #2 – Delayed and Missing Functionality

Google Apps customers are put at the back of the line for new features and functionality – especially when it comes to Gmail. Two cases in point: When Google rolled out themes to its Gmail users late last year, all users of Gmail on Google Apps were excluded from the launch. There was an acknowledgement within the forums that Google Apps users would be delayed but the notes implied only a few weeks. After several months, Google Apps users were finally given the ability to change Gmail themes with little fanfare.

More recently, Gmail users were given the ability to send messages from email aliases using a 3rd party SMTP server thus removing that hideously unprofessional “on behalf of” message viewable by many Outlook users. I was elated to see news about this added functionality but was disappointed to learn it was not included for Google Apps users. Instead, the blog post from the Gmail team implied all “on behalf of” messages would automatically be removed from Google Apps Gmail messages without use of a 3rd party SMTP server. Unfortunately, this has not proven the case with any of my outgoing messages and left me wondering why Gmail wouldn’t simply replicate what non-paid users have in place.

Reason #3 – Incomplete Suite of Applications

A major frustration with Google Apps is the fact that the entire suite of services offered by Google is not offered under the Google Apps umbrella. What I mean is services like Google Voice, Google Reader, Google Photos, etc. are not compatible with your Google Apps login ID. In other words, we must use our Google Apps login solely for Gmail, Documents, Sites, and Calendar and retain our non-Google Apps login (a.k.a. daveXXXX@gmail.com) for everything else. It amazes me that this is still an issue after several years of offering Google Apps. It may not seem like a big deal but because Google keeps you logged into their network, you’ll find yourself having to log out and log back in with the @gmail address to gain access to apps like Google Reader.

Reason #4 – Lack of Compatibility with 3rd Party Connections

This issue is somewhat similar to #3 in that many services which request access to Google apps such as Google Calendar will automatically default to an @gmail.com address and will fail to recognize a Google Apps email address as being valid. I’ve seen some newer web apps which are using an authentication process which enables access to Google Apps domains but this is unfortunately the exception, not the rule. Where I run into the greatest problems is with appointment links for GCal (Google Calendar). These often are routed only to my @gmail.com address and consequently added to the wrong calendar.

Reason #5 – Advertising

Believe it or not, I actually miss the advertising included within the standard Gmail interface. The layout of Gmail is such that on a widescreen monitor there is more than ample room to fit the right-hand advertising column and since these ads are highly relevant to my current emails, I consider them to be welcome. Google has always done a nice job keeping an adequate balance between advertising and utility and this remains the case with Gmail.

What I’ll Miss

I enjoy being able to brand the application interface and having everything wrap around my personal domain (daveonkels.com). I’ll also miss having 25gb of Gmail storage included with Google Apps Premiere but now that plain jane Gmail offers a paid storage upgrade option, this isn’t much of an issue.