Google’s great car crash
Thursday, August 25th, 2011 | Tech
Recently, Google merged their regular accounts with their Google Apps accounts. Unfortunately, they didn’t do it very well.
The problem is that people often had both accounts using the same email address. For example, chrisworfolkfoundation.org is managed by Google Apps and so we have an info@ email address. But because you only get mail, calendar and docs with Google Apps, in order to use services like YouTube and Google Checkout, Google made us set up a separate account with the same email address.
Now they have merged them all together, obviously they have found that they have a lot of conflicts.
Indeed, we noticed then when I recently tried to sign into the Foundation’s Checkout sellers account and found that it wouldn’t accept the right password. It would accept the other password, but that account was empty. When I contacted Google Support – a rarity they let you do I will tell you!, they said they had created a temporary account for me and I would have to sign in to that one and use the migration tool.
I signed in, there was no migration tool.
I then started to worry about my other accounts with Google and signed into one of their other services, at which point I finally made it onto the migration.
This would seem OK, I could migrate a lot of my data over to the new account. However it wasn’t as simple as this. First of all, a lot of the data is sensitive and doesn’t want to be accessed by everyone who has access to the email account. But you don’t seem to be able to migrate to any account other than the conflicting one. The only other option is to create a whole new account @gmail.com.
Secondly, none of it works. We use about 12 different Google services – 9 of which aren’t supported by the migration wizard, two of which are supported but weren’t available for us because there were complications. In fact, the wizard only actually allowed us to migrate one of our services – Picasa Web Albums over to the new system.
This left me with having to create a brand new @gmail.com account for the Foundation which many of our services are now using including YouTube, reCAPTCHA, Google Checkout, AdWords and many others. All of which now looses significant user confidence because what organisation uses an @gmail.com account?
After all this, many of the manual migration that Google suggests you do as a last resort doesn’t exist either. reCAPTCHA for example offers no way to transfer the domains/keys you hold to a different account and of course, because it’s now a just a small wing of the Google Corporation, you can’t contact support about it because Google don’t do customer support.
I actually mourn for the days of Microsoft, they weren’t perfect but at least they do backward compatibility and customer support.
Recently, Google merged their regular accounts with their Google Apps accounts. Unfortunately, they didn’t do it very well.
The problem is that people often had both accounts using the same email address. For example, chrisworfolkfoundation.org is managed by Google Apps and so we have an info@ email address. But because you only get mail, calendar and docs with Google Apps, in order to use services like YouTube and Google Checkout, Google made us set up a separate account with the same email address.
Now they have merged them all together, obviously they have found that they have a lot of conflicts.
Indeed, we noticed then when I recently tried to sign into the Foundation’s Checkout sellers account and found that it wouldn’t accept the right password. It would accept the other password, but that account was empty. When I contacted Google Support – a rarity they let you do I will tell you!, they said they had created a temporary account for me and I would have to sign in to that one and use the migration tool.
I signed in, there was no migration tool.
I then started to worry about my other accounts with Google and signed into one of their other services, at which point I finally made it onto the migration.
This would seem OK, I could migrate a lot of my data over to the new account. However it wasn’t as simple as this. First of all, a lot of the data is sensitive and doesn’t want to be accessed by everyone who has access to the email account. But you don’t seem to be able to migrate to any account other than the conflicting one. The only other option is to create a whole new account @gmail.com.
Secondly, none of it works. We use about 12 different Google services – 9 of which aren’t supported by the migration wizard, two of which are supported but weren’t available for us because there were complications. In fact, the wizard only actually allowed us to migrate one of our services – Picasa Web Albums over to the new system.
This left me with having to create a brand new @gmail.com account for the Foundation which many of our services are now using including YouTube, reCAPTCHA, Google Checkout, AdWords and many others. All of which now looses significant user confidence because what organisation uses an @gmail.com account?
After all this, many of the manual migration that Google suggests you do as a last resort doesn’t exist either. reCAPTCHA for example offers no way to transfer the domains/keys you hold to a different account and of course, because it’s now a just a small wing of the Google Corporation, you can’t contact support about it because Google don’t do customer support.
I actually mourn for the days of Microsoft, they weren’t perfect but at least they do backward compatibility and customer support.