Dear Google, I Just Want To Say Thanks

I know I rag on you a lot and also see a ton of ragging on you around the net. Seems like the in thing to do. But you make a lot of things I use everyday and I am very grateful for. So in this post I just wanted to say thank you and talk about them and what a difference they have made to our business. Google Docs Your Google Docs has changed a lot of the way I collaborate on documents. Since I started the ShoeMoney Newsletter I always first write it in Google docs then shoot over a email to Brienna to proof it. She corrects all my grammar and then sends me a email when she is done. Then I can grab it, post to aweber, fire it off and we're good. Also we can be anywhere really while this process happens. Also the Excel clone is money. I love being able to ask one of our accountants to share a P/L sheet (like the Elite Retreat) with me and I don't even have to talk to them after that. I can just look at the data. To me that's pretty money. And now with Google Gears I can use it all offline too! Just in Microsoft office licenses I estimate we are saving about $1,000 with Google Docs. Google Analytics We used to spend a fortune both financially and resource wise on Urchin to do our Analytics. When Google took them over they made it free. Sure its not the only analytical resource I use on my site but its by far the most used. I also love the ability to give other people access to stats VERY easily. This works great for the initial phases of purchasing a website. Google Webmaster Console Google really pioneered the space with the webmaster console showing users directly how their pagerank flowed, how googlebot indexes their website and even what pages were returning errors. Outstanding product! Google Website Optimizer I can't even begin to quantify the value of this tool. I think it's by far the most underrated, underused Google provided tool. How do you put a value on something that shows you very easily that by "using x version of your page; has a 80% better chance of conversion then what you were doing before". For example: . To do this before we had to setup all are own tracking code and... man what a pain. Google Website Optimizer makes life so much easier ;) Gmail For Your Domains Basically gmail... but so you can use it for your own domains. I do not use this for shoemoney.com... for now we have our own mail servers but I have set it up for many local companies. Its fricking sweet. Its a PAIN IN THE ASS to run your own mail servers. For one its a server.... another one you have to maintain... security update... update spam stuff... pain... One of my favorite parts was how you can easily add new users/delete and other stuff. Very cool stuff. Google Ad Manager This has made the most dramatic impact on us as of late. We used to use Openx/phpadsnew and it was very good but again... had to had its own server which meant security updates... server updates.. and just another point of failure. Not to mention saleability even with caching openx would go down if we got dugg so I would just not have the ads load if coming from digg... which was not ideal for advertisers. Google Ad Manager also allows us to do better CPM deals with our advertisers and much more. So if someone pinned me down on a figure I would estimate between server costs/ licensing fees/ hosting/bandwidth that these Google Services are saving us at least 25k per year. So I just want to say, "Thank You Google!"