Yes, we do. Especially all those business users who have paid for GApps and have trusted Google with their comms.
In general, we deserve to have more decentralised services that are built on the principle of 'privacy by design', rather than 'trust by design'. Maybe, screw-ups like this can help spur more efforts in that regard.
In a centralized system a central server routes calls and can make mistakes.
In a decentralized system like BitMesasge the likelihood of a misroute is so low that it would take a trillion trillion universes a trillion trillion lifetimes before the chance of it happening once was even remotely likely, given every atom in each universe were sending a message to an other atom each pico-second.
If you're asking me specifically, then yes I'd be willing to pay for it, preferably as a part of a set of services/tools (that would need to include imap, contact management, calendaring). I'd happily switch away from Google services for that, providing usability isn't hugely compromised [1]. I'm actually working on open-source infrastructure to get us closer to this [2].
If you're making a general point about why people would pay for such things then privacy/security is just one more axis on which to consider purchasing decisions. It's up to the individual/organisation to decide what they really care about when they're choosing between different options. My concern is that there aren't really enough options that do consider the privacy/security aspect as well as the usability, so I see a gap there. I'd be glad to hear others' opinions on this though.
[1] I was already a paying user of MobileMe purely because I wanted auto-syncing of contacts and calendar so that price-point ($99 per year) is clearly one I'm willing to pay for something that works. I paid it grudgingly at first but I did pay (and renew). Whether that's actually a sustainable price-point for the provider is a different question.
I agree that paid GApps customers absolutely do, and maybe even a slight refund for the outage they should be taking. But free customers don't. With no payment also comes no expectation of service (outside the Terms of Service, which probably says that this kind of stuff will happen from time to time).
I respectfully (and strongly) disagree. You're essentially saying that free customers can be completely screwed over and have basically no rights at all (and you seem to be implying that this ok). Legally speaking, maybe Google has absolutely no obligation to say anything (even to it's paying customers), but this isn't about meeting the minimum legal requirements.
On a related note, how many people really have the ability to comprehend the ToS they click on? The reading level of many of those is surprisingly high given the demographics that use the services, so the concept of 'informed consent' is already quite strained imho. Therefore, people fall back on trust and it's probably in the providers interest that they do this (as they can make a ToS that's great for their own needs, while legally providing very little to the user).
> With no payment also comes no expectation of service
As a general rule, this is not true according to the law. If I feed someone a free meal, and they get food poisoning because I didn't maintain proper hygiene in my kitchen, I am at fault.
We do, this is a huge violation of the trust people place in google's chat / hangouts. It doesn't matter that many people don't pay for the product, free or not there is an implicit contract between google and its users that things like this should not happen. Moreover, many people have paid subscriptions to google apps and obviously give them money directly.
