Alphabet Inc.\u2019s Google was sued by an early adopter of its Workspace cloud productivity software who claims the company reneged on a promise to provide it with free access to the program for life.<\/p>\n
Google Workspace, formerly known as Google Apps and G Suite, provides a host of services including Gmail, Calendar, Drive for storage and Google Docs for content creation.<\/p>\n
Some of the programs are free to all, but enterprise features such as custom email addresses and shared Drive storage cost extra.<\/p>\n
The Stratford Company LLC sued on behalf of all early adopters who were lured to use the software in its early stages, allowing Google to fine-tune it and then sell it for a fee.<\/p>\n
In exchange, Stratford Company said the early adopters were promised a free version of Workspace as long as Google offered it.<\/p>\n
In 2012, Google started charging new customers $12 a month to use the software. Then, in 2022, Google notified legacy users that they would also be charged, although it later excluded non-business users of the software.<\/p>\n
\u201cGoogle\u2019s abandonment of the credo \u2018don\u2019t be evil\u2019 is well-illustrated in this case,\u201d Stratford Company said in the complaint, filed Friday in San Jose federal court.<\/p>\n
\u201cGoogle, as the better part of a conglomerate worth nearly two trillion dollars, breaks a promise to loyal customers who helped Google develop a profitable product, in order to pad its already grossly outsized profits.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stratford company is seeking class-action status for all the early adopters and damages to be determined at trial, but more than $5 million.<\/p>\n
Google didn\u2019t immediately respond to an emailed request for comment, sent after regular business hours.<\/p>\n
Alphabet Inc.\u2019s Google was sued by an early adopter of its Workspace cloud productivity software who claims the company reneged on a promise to provide it with free access to the program for life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341034,"featured_media":444920,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[32030,45011,167,11014,66981],"class_list":["post-455717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-software","tag-alphabet","tag-g-suite","tag-google","tag-google-apps","tag-google-workspace"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/455717"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=455717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/455717\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/444920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=455717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=455717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=455717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}