Ah, Google, you and your nefarious layout trickery. There was much debate and hot air lost among the technorati this morning over an article on TweetCrunch over the supposed end of the free version of Google Apps. It turned out that, just kidding, Google had merely hidden the page with the ability to sign up for free. If you are so inclined, head over here and sign up. A Google spokesman claimed that it was all a big mistake, and that the free version had been removed accidentally.
Like hell.
But the story only becomes more entertaining when we bring in the ever blowing-hard Mark Cuban. Mark wrote a piece recently called “When you succeed with free, you are going to die by free.” Of course when the Google story broke he jumped on the wagon. Mark tossed up a new post that is now wildly incorrect with the news that, in fact, Google Apps is still free. Listen to him:
“ Has Google realized that at least in the corporate market (B2B), if you live by free, you die by free ? That the rising expectations of support and product enhancements by corporations never end and are expensive to live up to ?”
That would be brilliant if anything had changed. Not that I disagree with Mark on freemium, I am quite positive that it will be the future of the whole internet, but this time he seems a little hysterical. More as it comes.
