Earn $2000 for a handful of emails! Google launches Apps referral programme in NZ
Why I'm giving it a miss.
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Summer features
Google launches its Apps Referral Programme in New Zealand today.
The scheme gives people who use and like the $US50/year Google Apps for Work a way to recommend the product to their friends, customers and networks and earn $20 for every user they sign up – until they hit a cap of $2000 (the commercial version of Google Apps is charged in US dollars everywhere; referrals are paid out in New Zealand dollars. Full details are here).
More than 10,000 individuals have signed up for the Google Apps Referral programme since it was launched in the US and Canada in March last year, the company says.
I won't join them. I use the paid version of Google Apps and find it okay. Over the past 12 months it's had 100% uptime, and I like the email, calendar and collaboration features but for New Zealanders, Google Docs and Spreadsheets (the company's cloud-based equivalents) are at times just too slow. Sometimes I type a sentence, and it takes several seconds to appear onscreen.
Microsoft's Office 365 isn't perfect either, but at least my licence also lets me install ye olde desktop version in parallel.
Local Google Apps partner Fronde tells me performance has much improved over the past six months. But, sorry, I'm just not seeing it. Until Google hosts Apps locally or sorts out its bandwidth to Australia (or whatever's slugging things up), I'm not going to refer it to a friend.
Pity, I could have used $2000.
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Earn $2000 for a handful of emails! Google launches Apps referral programme in NZ
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