I feel very frustrated when I hear this argument, as if it’s futile to switch to a different email provider. It’s actually hyperbole. Most people use chat and messaging platforms (or social media platforms) to communicate with others. Personal email, IME, has reduced drastically over the years. That leaves emails that businesses send to individuals, which are usually sent through non-free-profiling-based-Gmail methods (including GSuite, which Google cannot use to profile people). Only small businesses that don’t know any better or don’t want to spend money on email would use an @gmail address (or @yahoo, @outlook, etc.) to correspond with potential and current customers.
Perhaps because many people, like me, have a primary non gmail address that is forwarded to my gmail address. That, and businesses with custom domains that use Google apps and thus have gmail as the UI.
But nobody uses it because it isn't as good as gmail. Before Gmail, it was a lot more common to use your ISP's email. And given the current monopoly power of ISPs I'm pretty doubtful that any such bundling would be in users' best interests.
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.
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 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.
I have a gmail account, but I don't use it. I would say the same for any business. No business with any sense is going to rely on Gmail for their internal business communications.
Outside of corps ideologically opposed to using Office, like IBM and Oracle, I've almost never seen anybody that didn't run on Outlook. At least since Notes became abandonware anyway.
Because they're not techies and don't trust themselves to 'throw up a few servers' reliably? I dunno, that's my guess, since it seems they were looking for an email contract both with Outlook and now with Gmail.
I've run my own e-mail for the past 20 years, including setting up DKIM and all of that. Why do nearly all of you use some corporate service like gmail?
Hands down, Google Apps (not Gmail) is the best hosted email service for businesses. That's why companies use it. It's so good that wasting precious engineering resources on reinventing the wheel makes absolute no sense whatsoever. Oh, and don't forget email deliverability, spam detection, and a slew of other features that your cobblestone of postfix, dovecot, and roundcube will never even come close to reaching feature parity with.
This is why I use one of the new, privacy-focused email providers instead. It feels like the sweet spot between starting my own server (headache, dropped messages) and being one of a billion Gmail/Outlook users (no-one cares if I don't get email)
I use Google Apps for Business because I no longer have to think about the bullshit around mail and spam, and that's not going to change until the alternatives are worth the time they require me to invest. I get the argument regarding Gmail, but if you want somebody to not use Gmail, you're gonna have to be better than Gmail. Nobody is. (Outlook.com is okay, but their web client is garbage and email is one of fairly few things I want as a web app.)
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