I suspect in part because Google eats its own dogfood here. GMail evolved out of Google's original internal e-mail system and is still the default mode of communication within the company today. That is in part why it is so fast and responsive: inefficiency equates to Google losing $$ on wasted productivity.
By comparison, I suspect that MS largely uses Outlook internally rather than Hotmail; surprisingly, the same is true of Yahoo (http://goo.gl/82mlql). FB employees, for their part, apparently use their personal accounts for a lot of work-related communication, which strikes me as a little weird.
That could definitely be part of it. Outlook isn't dumbed down because it's not primarily aimed at home users. Maybe Gmail makes sense for few people in the office the way Outlook makes sense for few people at home. That doesn't change the fact that the bandwidth/latency profiles are different going to the server room in the building than going out to the internet. But I might see a big improvement over what Gmail is now if Google was being designed for business users.
I suppose it's that 90% of offices around the world use Microsoft products (Windows, Office, etc...) so it's very difficult to not use them both for users (they must use it in work) and for companies (try explaining that you fucked something up because Pages displayed something different to Word)
Similarly, massive chunks of the internet rely on Google (and Facebook) for functionality like authentication. Aside from that, I'd struggle to suggest a different mail provider than gmail such is there monopoly in that space.
I also think am own domain and email is the better option and I cannot understand why a company of 100-150 employees would use google mail. Is it because of searching, sorting options or something else that is much better with gmail?
My GMail is consistently faster than my corporate Outlook, on the LAN, in a company with ~200 employees. This has been true of every company I've worked at.
I don't know about Yahoo, but in other organizations I've seen employees using gmail, for work, because it's more convenient than the corporate/enterprise email platform.
Because Google has a monopoly on non-shitty free email with GMail, in the same way that Microsoft has (had?) a monopoly on hardware-independent operating systems with DOS/Windows. (I wish I was really being sarcastic, you know because there are actually a billion web-based e-mail alternatives besides GMail that actually don't suck... right? Anybody know of any? At this point I'm earnestly inquiring.)
Well, the reason is cost. Gmail works well because when you click on it you get a few milliseconds of resources on thousand of computers. The rest of the time those computers are doing something else. The economics aren't great for any organization that doesn't have those boxes laying around already. Also obviously Google has search technology laying around in their kitchen drawer. If you don't have that you are starting at a disadvantage.
I'm not certain that you appreciate how crucial and widespread native email clients are in the business and academic worlds, both on the desktop and on mobile devices.
Maybe these users do have personal Hotmail or Gmail accounts. However, for anything serious and work-related, they're very likely using Outlook, Lotus Notes, Mail.app, Thunderbird, or one of the numerous other native email clients.
Many people, especially those in management, sales, accounting, finance or other communication-heavy areas of business, often spend many hours each workday using a native email client, on both the desktop and on mobile devices.
Within technical and academic circles, and also the open source community, many people prefer native email clients because they're so much more powerful than the web-based clients.
Furthermore, I personally know a lot of people who have an @gmail.com account, but they essentially always use it from a native client via IMAP and SMTP, rather than using the web interface. They use it mainly because it's free, and because of its large storage space, rather than because of its web interface.
And Gmail is still absolutely dog shit at performing basic features that have been table stakes for email clients since the 1990s. Specifically mass moving/deleting/filtering emails.
Every company I work at that uses G-Suite has me begging for Outlook even though I haven't worked with Windows professionally in over 15 years.
Not everyone, but I would wager that most do: Many office desktops went from having an instance of Outlook.exe open 24 hours a day, to a couple of tabs in Chrome. Which is exactly why Google made it a rich, all-encompassing platform (calendars, contacts, instant messaging) -- it's a conversation dashboard that is intended to sit resident.
This whole discussion sounds like some sort of Fastmail astroturfing campaign. I mean when people complain about Google+ (which in gmail is wholly materialized as a +YourName up in the corner), it sounds like rote talking points.
We switched to Google Apps at my company. Out of 120 employees, there are still 37 using Outlook. Some of them use Gmail on the web periodically, but most of those 37 are adamant about not switching (even though the Outlook on Gmail experience is objectively terrible compared to in-browser).
I don’t have a dog in the fight, I don’t choose Gmail or Outlook. But if I were to play devil’s advocate, I think I would argue Outlook is better on the grounds that Microsoft is not an advertising company. As a company, they don’t depend on distributing free software to folks who are willing to, or maybe ignorant they are trading their personal privacy in exchange.
No doubt Microsoft is trying to monetize user data at this point as well, but their empire isn’t built on top of it. The parent comment said they use ProtonMail for personal, So I suspect they only reason they don’t choose that for business also is the weight the Microsoft name still holds.
Many of us got sucked into the Google vortex a while back on the basis they gave us many of the best software options, in many categories. But at this point, there is nothing Google does that you can’t find an alternative of equal or better quality. So if one day a person realizes Google values don’t align with their own, slowly phasing out all Google services can only have a net positive.
Because it's the best email system available for most people. If you value productivity and usability the most, Gmail is the way to go. It's that simple.
Gmail is the only email system that I can tolerate. It actually makes using email borderline fun, whereas even something like Exchange is a nightmare. It works great with various applications, smartphones and has by far the best Web interface around. It handles spam well and allows me to easy filter messages (and have those filters work across devices).
For most of us, email is a tool that helps us get work done and communicate with family and friends. Rolling our own solutions is not worth the extra time, headaches and lost usability.
Google doesn't care about our data individually. They make money in anonymized, aggregate data. That's why I don't care that they are making money off of my data, because it's not my data that they care about. It's our data that they really care about.
And while I'd prefer if my email didn't fall into the hands of the US government, I don't actually have anything that I care that they see in it. It's more principle than anything else. And, as a US citizen, if I rolled my own solution, I don't think it would be any safer in my hands than Google's when it comes to warrants.
I do have real fears. My real fears with email are in using a system that isn't usable, isn't reliable and has data integrity issues. At the end of the day, Google's servers and technical know-how surpasses mine, and I feel that my email is safer and less likely to be lost due to hardware failure in their hands than in mine.
It really depends on what you value. If my email information was really sensitive, I would probably care more. If I were a company that valued sensitivity a lot, I might not use Gmail. Certainly if the work you do or the industry you are in needs the utmost privacy, you should look into the most secure option as possible.
But as an individual, Gmail is as good as it gets for me.
I don’t use Gmail for business purposes, which is the area where this sort of interface shines. Gmail is absolutely n.1 in personal email, but a lot (most?) business email still runs through outlook, and that’s where the money is.
I used to not like Outlook at work, but when I worked for a startup they used GSuites and the Google mail experience is so bad I honestly couldn't believe that anyone would be using it. Threads are mixed together when multiple people reply its impossible to read content anymore and they do also change the formatting of content which puzzled me the most.
Maybe for people that only ever used Gmail it's okay, because they are used to its weirdness and have never seen a more structured and visually appealing way to read email.
By comparison, I suspect that MS largely uses Outlook internally rather than Hotmail; surprisingly, the same is true of Yahoo (http://goo.gl/82mlql). FB employees, for their part, apparently use their personal accounts for a lot of work-related communication, which strikes me as a little weird.
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