>"One of the lessons I learned from that was just in terms of my own psychology, that it was important that I always have a working product. The first thing I do on day one is build something useful, then just keep improving it."
google products are clearly written by people fresh out of high school. They are utterly devoid of features and functionality that MS had developed 20 years ago. It's so sad the lack of desktop integration, alerts, rules, and being able to utilize external data in 'sheets' and other nonsensical toy apps.
But we have a generation that grew up on 'free' crap and they honestly don't know any better, and MS is far too inept to market anything.
Also it's so nice to not be the ones with the 'old and out of date' office installs, or doing bids with big companies and not being able to open their XL sheets. I can't even fathom trying to compete using children's toys like google anything.
I have no idea if or why they would cancel it or not, just saying that the numbers you gave seem like small potatoes. Then again Google really needs to show alternatives to advertising revenue (e.g. why Nest was brought onto Google's balance sheet).
What is bad about Webmail in general: Webmail is not email. Public Wifi Spots, even Internet providers are more and more blocking ports.
Back in 2014, both Outlook and Gmail had free family plans with custom domain capability, but have since removed those options. Is there a good low-cost option for custom domain email in 2019? For people who use and rely on email a lot, Fastmail is definitely the best option, but it is too expensive for my use case. I would like to set up custom domains for my family (5-10 people in total) and I would like to know what is the cost-effective best practice to do so these days.
This way, if Google mail goes away, you can pick up another free email provider to relay mail through in the future (assuming everyone else also allows "send mail as").
you don't even need to buy your domain from them.
I was in my mid-late 20's and If I'm being honest with myself, I think I looked at Gmail as the webmail provider that more "savvy" or professional people used. I wanted something I could use for both personal stuff and professional contacts so the old silly_forum_name@yahoo.com wouldn't cut it.
Later on this would shift to using my own domain to express professionalism but I still have my first.last@gmail address as the account all of my friends and family use.