I love Google. I love Gmail. I love Google Maps, Google Docs. Google always seemed to be run by the geeks (a good thing!) instead of a company like Microsoft – run by marketing MBAs. Stuff from Google has always been clean, clutter-free and just worked great.
So their Google Apps transfer procedure is a clusterfuck and a black eye on their reputation. I doubt you’ll hear about it much because I don’t think it affects a lot of people – or maybe you’ll hear about it more once they force the upgrade through in a few weeks (you can upgrade now or be automatically upgrade in a few weeks.)
Here’s my simple setup. I’ve got my leroyskibone.com domain. My leroy@leroyskibone.com email address.
I also have my Youtube account linked to leroy@leroyskibone.com
It was years ago, but I probably setup my leroy@leroyskibone.com email address on Gmail first, then decided it would be cool to use Google Apps for my email, so I setup Google Apps for my leroyskibone.com domain.
Now, as part of the Google Apps upgrade, Google is telling me that leroy@leroyskibone.com is a ‘personal’ account and my Google Apps stuff is not – so I can change that email address to an ‘organizational’ account and transfer over all my information. Cool. Oh wait – I can transfer over everything EXCEPT my email.
So I use one email address for two things – Gmail and Youtube. And thanks to their great transfer process – I would now need one account for each. That’s a pain in the ass. Very ungoogly of you, Google.
The only point of installing Google Apps was to ‘simplify’ and manage my email with Gmail. Now they have made it complicated. So Google Apps is gone. I’m back to having the fine folks at Dreamhost manage my email. But I guess for a day or two, my email is stuck in DNS-updating limbo. It’s a good thing I’m not popular. But where will my daily doses of spam go?