Too big to live, too loved to die: Big Tech's billion dollar curse of the free
theregister.com
theregister.com
Gmail may not be very profitable by itself or even a net negative, but it is definitely a centerpiece of google's business.
For a sizable portion of humanity, Google is the default provider of their digital identity, something they leveraged even more with Android.
THE centerpiece. The average Google user spends ~5min a day on search, and ~6 hours a day on Gmail.
Whereas the average Google search supposedly takes 14.6 seconds: https://fitsmallbusiness.com/google-search-statistics/
Doesn't leave much room for anything else in the day there if people are spending that much time on it. Especially since that doesn't seem to account for any social media or online chat (Slack, Teams) or other internet time either.
Even when my job had a good chunk of responding to emails I don't think I spent more than an two hours a day on it.
As for personal emails I think I spend maybe 20 minutes a day on that, mostly just quickly glancing at notifications that show up there and clicking through if necessary. And work emails I'm probably at about 10 minutes at my current job, I don't get that many and the ones I do get don't require much time or a response.
Although my situation is likely atypical. Still the average seems like the polar opposite to me, and should be the high, not the average.
Your numbers are worthless.
Without a device in every hand/household Meta simply pays rent to Tim and Sundar and, as ATT demonstrated, is up for eviction at any time. Meta needs a hit device to survive.
Meta, the company, might not seem to have great prospects for now; but the metaverse is still the future despite its current clunky form factor and high cost (with the exception of the Quest 2).
In defense of Zuck, I agree with sklargh. Solely relying on ad revenue is a future dead end. Facebook needs its own hardware platform to survive.
It was a simple strategic move.
It is you and other zuck-haters who have projected all these things to fit your narrative
All these videos though could be a good thing for Meta and Oculus's adoption..there were tons of other videos with the Nintendo Wii with users throwing their controllers and breaking things.
In Gmail's case, it would seem to be pretty tied into the parts of Goggle's business that actually do make money.
Conversational assistants? I don't know. They don't seem to have really panned out for the most part and I'm not sure they're much changed from at least five years ago in spite of vast armies of expensive developers being paid to work on them. At some point you just admit that a bet isn't going to pay off in an interesting time horizon.
A small company working on the same problem with passionate skilled devs would do better imo, albeit lacking the brand recognition of Google or apple. I feel like Google _could_ do much better in this space if they really wanted to; but do they want to
Voice recognition is actually quite good. The problem is that the assistants aren't "smart" enough to actually do much that's useful with that voice recognition. And I suspect that, for a lot of things, voice alone just isn't that great either for input or output.
It's essentially another AI problem where surprisingly good isn't necessarily all that useful.
You'd be right if you were only discussing Alexa, Siri, or some lesser known assistants like Kortana; but Google's assistant is pretty decent at understanding your requests.
There is an easy exit strategy for Google (and Amazon), and Google has already done it for Gmail: put a reasonable cap on how much users are allowed to use (storage for Gmail, # of queries for Alexa) and charge for anything on top of that. As server-side hardware costs decrease, wait for that "billion dollar curse" to asymptotically approach zero over the course of a few years.
There’s probably a 1% of users who use more than the other 99% added up and quotas cut down on that.
But in spite of having thousands of email messages, Gmail wasn't taking up much room at all.
Is storage really that expensive at Google scale that this would constitute a real cost saving measure after engineering overhead of implementation and PR backlash?
Likely multiple stages downhill, from multiple site redundancy to single site but multiple hosts to multiple drives on a single host to single drive but still copied over if the drive reaches some scheduled EOL before of failure. Perhaps there's even a very last stage, available as long as that one drive is still powered up.
And when you consider that hard drives have stagnated in price over the past few years, YouTube is doomed if it does not delete unprofitable videos. Unless prices to host content goes down, the whole thing becomes a sort of ponzi.
The suggested idea, which Google might already do, is to keep the low quality videos in less redundant storage on the theory that they can be re-encoded from the more durably stored original video if the underlying storage fails.
Not necessarily, is storage(and not retrieval) that much of a cost? and if so is youtube's revenue/storage cost actually decreasing? and if it is would the backlash for deleting people's videos worth the reputational cost? especially when you have an entire industry around small people trying to get big, the majority of which will never get there.
Youtube even tried putting a limitation on non-premium users watching 4k video and pulled back on it, can't imagine something as drastic as deleting videos would be worth it.
I think the article has a point, but is overselling it as bigger than it actually is.
I've found this varies. I've had to make a few new gmail accounts lately for various reasons, and only once was forced to add a phone number.
Koomey's Law says compute costs will be ~1/16th / ~7% in a decade.
IIUC, storage prices & bandwidth reduce at slower rates.
"Approaching 0" and "a few years" seem a little hyperbolic.
Probably worse, Koomey's law is an observation based on the effects of Dennard scaling (constant power density while doubling transistor count due to scaling), and this pretty much ended over a decade ago due to no longer being possible to scale transistors in a uniform way.
Power improvements will continue due to other one off process improvements, and due to other factors such as architectural improvements or moving more things into hardware, but the trend is not going to be as pronounced or consistent as it was before.
Compare top CPUs from 2012 and current top CPUs
I've opened cpubenchmark and compared those CPUs:
AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5995WX
and
Intel Core i7-3970X @ 3.50GHz (I didnt know how to find something better)
First one has 98k points, second one has 8k points.
It's giant gap.
even pretty normal (consumer) CPU like Intel Core i9-13900K has 60k~ points.
I did not say transistor count, I said power density due to transistor scaling. There is a difference, transistor counts have continued to increase since 10 years ago for other reasons, but it no longer comes with the implicit power density and switching speed improvements of dennard scaling underlying the original moors law projection. It also doesn't have the same road ahead of it since transistors are no longer uniformly scaling, and dies can't grow exponentially.
> First one has 98k points, second one has 8k points.
Why do you think that is?
What are "points", how have CPUs changed since 2012? and How did 2012 CPUs change since 2002? i.e what are the qualitative differences between these periods that are made opaque by "points", and which are key in indicating improvement projections.
Isn't Gmail the core pillar of Google's ad network? Whoever is logged into Gmail tells Google who is using an IP address. Facebook is the other ad network because they can also link requests to ids.
Facebook can monetize Instagram because they can sell targeted ads. Likewise, Google can monetize Youtube. If ads can be sold without those ids, Instagram and Youtube could have grown on their won.
Is this an emperor's clothing situation and nobody talks about this or do I have a complete misunderstanding of ad technology?
Google already has most people's IP address through search. Google is just providing free email because they want control, and I am willing to bet that it would be very hard to make profit, both direct or indirect, through gmail.
Search > email, though I think they're both pillars.
For Google, the easiest way to gain new GMail users is to not deliver mail coming to existing users from 3rd party services or to throw it into trash/spam folders for no reason.
The gmail account just as a correlation ID has a ton of value in search.
Were you searching for homes to buy? You'll probably use your google account. Bought a couple of home automation devices, cameras, and doorbells? Chances are you are using a google login.
Use Waze in your car? Now google knows what car you drive and the places where you go and can tie it nicely with all other pieces of data because you are using your google account.
This is invaluable for them. From your usage of a google account, they can infer your family arrangements, probably what your job is, your income and wealth level, tastes and habits.
Absolutely. GMail is the main reason people are logged into their Google account all the time on their computers and mobile devices. It is absolutely essential for tracking.
Hadn't they grown on their own before they got bought up?
I would guess Google doesn’t read emails because the data is more difficult to parse (there’s a lot of it) and, when compared to intent based interests that can be gleaned from your google searches, the value of the content in your inbox is lower than most people think.
regarding encryption i’ve only found this:
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6330403?hl=en#zippy=%...
> Email encryption in transit S/MIME is used to support enhanced encryption in transit, and automatically encrypts your outgoing emails if it can.
> Important: These steps only work if you have S/MIME enabled on your account
The zero-setup encryption offered by cloud providers is also smoke and mirrors. It's a key they control, so while it may improve security against someone internal snooping on a raw SAN device it doesn't do much for your privacy.
> We do not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads If you have a work or school account, you will never be shown ads in Gmail.
> When you use your personal Google account and open the promotions or social tabs in Gmail, you'll see ads that were selected to be the most useful and relevant for you. The process of selecting and showing personalized ads in Gmail is fully automated. These ads are shown to you based on your online activity while you're signed into Google, however we do not process email content to serve ads.
This caused no damage as the public needed to know what X was to Google it, and it was unannounced. But it was suspicious. Either Google was scanning GSuite Gmail or Drive accounts, or perhaps someone stored a document on or sent an email to a personal Google account with some keywords. How these things happen is always very opaque with companies like Google.
To add, I believe they have since turned that future down.
Basically account recovery is next to impossible. If your GSuite admin fucks up somehow and gets locked out, good luck getting back in lol.
Its not clear if the way the mess will resolve is reverting back to true "big tech" where we pay for tech (as opposed to big adtech or big ecommerce providing tech as a sideshow) or is some other pattern will emerge.
The astonishing amount of freebies points on the one hand on the increasingly low cost of tech, on the other hand on the enormous commercial benefit of extracting value from user behavior.
What will be the new equilibrium and will it in any sense feel "right" and sustainable? Its a trillion dollar question.
i don't know how they can add those fees now but it would have been reasonable if they just started that way instead of crossing their fingers Hoping they'd find a way to monetize in the future
Right now I'm the product and so I have no expectation of customer service. When I'm paying 1 dollar a month I'm holding someone liable if I lose access to my account.
And, legally, I can reasonably take Gmail to court for monetary loss and f I am a paying customer. 200k people going to small claims court for whatever will completely wipe out any profit that alphabet hopes to make of Gmail.
So, yeah, it's cheaper for Gmail to provide free accounts with no liability than to get caught up in mandatory customer protection laws.
I have no experience of actually using it
I am more willing to pay for Amazon Prime and its music service is more useful to me. I also enjoy Fire TV cube because it is voice controlled. I can say the same for voice controls on Google TV and Apple TV, especially for Android Car and Apple Car Play.
It’s a loss leader that makes sense just like discounted soda that you place in the back of a supermarket, so you can force your customers to check out your other deals
It will once Google removes Spotify and all other third party alternatives to their own services.
I'm typically against monopolistic practices that favor massive platforms, but this actually seems fully justified given that these voice control devices are losing so much money. I think it's fair for both Amazon Alexa and Google Home to be made incompatible with third party services. I'd rather them do this than see the devices wither on the vine.
Just tell the regulators that the services and their associated hardware are losing money and that they'll be forced to shut down unless the companies can promote their own platforms exclusively.
If Google and Amazon make this move to drop third party support at the same time, they won't have to worry about losing customers to the other home automation product. (Just make sure that it isn't collusion!)
Similarly, I have no idea if it is possible but I imagine it is trivial to link purchases, especially if they require showing a membership card, with identity, and feed all that into a CRM / customer identity database.
It'd be kinda silly to run a large scale retail operation without doing these things, honestly.
The chicken / hot dog reference is to a USA based "big box" store that sells these things (meat products) at cost / loss as a form of advertising to get customers in the door. That chain also requires that people be "members" of the club prior to letting them in the store.
I pay for Amazon Prime, so when I played the music, I clicked the track and it played another song. I though I had misclicked.
It turns out Amazon Prime’s music offering is “It plays something else unless you pay up another specific fee.” It’s quite entertaining.
Amazon usually does a decent job of continuing support. But by their own admission they have written off $10B and followed by massive layoffs predominantly in Alexa divisions. Alexa infrastructure is massive and it'll be now put on life support. Mind you that even on life support the infrastructure is incurring massive costs with zero $$ revenue. Perhaps only critical security updates will be rolled out. So expect things to break around the edges, at first.
Maybe Amazon will rollout Alexa specific subscription? Otherwise I just don't see how to justify the running costs.
You're right that I wouldn't pay for just that functionality directly, but I pay for Prime, and spend a fair chunk on AWS every month. And if amazon abandons Alexa then I'll just move everything to another ecosystem.
Why? I'm not an Alexa user, but I am a Prime and AWS user. I don't understand how having a voice interface for weather reports impacts your decision for cloud computing or package delivery. Additionally, what other ecosystem would you move to? Google or Microsoft because they offer both voice interfaces and cloud computing? Why does that impact Prime?
I really don't see how these three things are linked in your mind. I could see some link if you used AWS to provide custom Alexa services, or used Alexa to play Prime content (music, audio books) but you specifically said you don't use Alexa for anything other than two really generic use cases.
Amazon probably just wanted to ax a large division to cut costs to prop up the stock price, and Alexa was an obvious target.
Probably another victim of the end of 0% interest rates is the idea that we can force everything into "the cloud" and run it indefinitely, funded by the whiffs and vapors of whatever possible value we can extract (without running afoul of privacy laws or angry customers if they find out) in the fractions of a cent per month or year range. Compute has gotten cheap but it's still not free, and "the cloud" is still overwhelmingly outweighed in power by "not the cloud". Plus the compute tasks keeps getting larger and larger; it doesn't do "the cloud" any good if people smoothly transition from wanting voice recognition to wanting GPT-type chatbots and cloud video gaming and other things that you can't serve 50,000 people from a single beefy computer.
I've been resisting a lot of cloud-level computation in my life, where even where I permit it I retain the ability to do my own thing, like serve my own videos in my house. I've really been more concerned about data ownership but this has factored in, too; I'm abundantly endowed with more computing resources at home than I can use, but all these free or cheap cloud services are remote (adding latency) and incentivized to short change the resources because they are expensive. The ad-based economy still doesn't pay enough to fund reasonable levels of performance; Facebook's profits couldn't afford a Raspberry Pi's level of performance dedicated to you in a year, let alone what I have sitting around the house. Even as computing becomes cheap in the cloud, the computing in my house is also becoming cheap, and I'm not even particularly trying to have a lot of it. Trying to keep up with it in a centralized system picking up a penny here and a penny there is not something that can be sustained without free money.
Their voice assistance is constantly learning so a good chunk of voice recognition related computation takes place in cloud.
However, even if the voice recognition is done locally, the vast majority of responses are streamed from the cloud. Only trivial requests such as "Set timer" can be handled locally.
As of 2019, Amazon had sold 100 million Alexa devices. Whichever way I look at it, those many devices incur a big running cost at the backend cloud to service.
"Responses" streamed from the cloud differ a lot in terms of whether or not it's some sort of "API" response that could be a couple of cheap kilobytes of JSON, or a full text-to-speech audio file.
I can't speak to Alexa, but I do use Google Maps, and it obviously has two modes for its TTS; a slightly nicer mode that streams from the cloud if you're on the network, but a perfectly serviceable lower quality one generated from the device if it can't get to the cloud at the time. I've often wondered why they don't just put the nicer cloud model on my device. Maybe when Maps was first starting it was a big difference, but now I'm sure my cell can run that "nice" model just as well. It's not like they're running a massive multi-billion parameter thing that only runs on the latest graphics cards (or, if they are, they aren't getting that much additional value for it), I'm sure it's something we could run locally just fine.
Learning could always be done by sampling some things to send up.
The irony, as you noted, is even as consumer devices have gotten more and more powerful computation and processing is being pushed to the backend/cloud. For example; to get a EC2 that's comparable with my laptop one has to pay through the nose. But still most of my machine's CPU cycles is idling and is used for rendering webpages. To make matters worse, most of the tools now a days are web only. Even if I want to use there's no app. There are exceptions of course such as IntelliJ, Figma etc., but sadly they should be the norm but aren't.
To me, it feels as if because bandwidth got cheaper engineers just got lazy and stopped having to think to take advantage of client device's capabilities. It's gotten so bad that most of the apps wouldn't even start without internet connection.
You could call those losses investment, and compare it to how Amazon took over the world (pre AWS) without making a profit.
Consistently growing 40% year on year is expensive. It doesn't mean it's not doing great.
It's not losses, it's investments for continuing the exponential growth in revenue. When that investment is not needed because market saturation, this can quickly flip to billions in profit.
They could choose to not grow, and instead realize it as profit, but it's not a long term good move.
It's probably a good idea to spend $4B (made up number) this year in order to be able to grow revenues next year by $11B. (some simplified arithmetic based on Q3's $6.868B revenue times 4 for the year)
And then next year $5.6B to acquire $15B the year after.
The nature of exponential growth (anyone who's started a growing company would know this) is that the investment that was expensive this year could easily be paid by the same company next year.
Assuming Google can avoid investing the $4B with current customer base, that would take them over a billion into profitable territory.
Again, have a look at how Amazon did this the last ~20 years.
You can't spin up a DC the same month you find out you need the capacity. It just cannot be done. You need to take into account the time axis.
I'm looking forward to the Q4 earnings report. We live in interesting times, though. The USD exchange rate due to the wider economy has significantly affected the earnings of multinational conglomorates as expressed in USD, lately.
Until one day it isn't. And then you're permanently locked out of every single site you use that email to sign up with.
Both of which I pay for.
Turns out losing both my laptop and my phone simultaneously was enough to lock me out of both forever - LP wanted me to click a link sent to my email to login from a new device, and said email account (GSuite) required a password stored in LastPass.
I largely gave up after 3 months of trying, and created new accounts for everything.
Years of work lost largely due to being stonewalled by Google support at every step.
My current best hope for recovery is that the recent lastpass breach data goes public and I can crack my own vault using the passphrase I know for it.
Maybe double check the "try another way" login options and maybe one of them will help you get back in.
Good luck!
In those services and in all the other ones I still have to give them my email to confirm the accounts and actions like replacing that email with a new one. Or login with OAuth, if one does that sort of things, which is back to giving our email to somebody else.
Without the original email we are toast anyway.
Now, while the cost to provision a GB of storage keeps dropping Google's prices haven't been revised down ever (from what I can remember).
I pay for Google storage and know of a several others who do the same. I suspect the number of paying users is growing
Probably one of the best value online services I paid for.
Now, I'm still self-hosting, but most of my private email is nevertheless being archived and farmed by a company, because almost everyone I talk with is using them. Sigh.
If you want privacy, you need to add a layer of encryption on top.
So no, in that case it's not a whole lot of info.
Own your email domain, but point it somewhere capable.
if you like a no fuzz setup,use fastmail
We will end up seeing something like the "Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935" but this really was focused on electricity providers that crossed US State lines - and I suspect something something international concerns will mean a conglomerates regulation approach and leave us with about three or four more or less seperate internets with different regulatory regiemes.
All of those make their interests and mine line up, so I don't need to have faith in them to entrust them with my email.
As a sidenote:
Reminds me of the situation with UberEats and DoorDash, though they're not free services.
People like these services. In terms of raw users, they're enormous. DoorDash has something like 25 million users.
But they're absolutely burning money. An average of $250 million a year for DoorDash, and sometimes as high as $400 million.
But investors keep dumping money into it, because clearly there is enormous demand. And if there's demand, there must be some way to make it profitable.
But none of them have noticed that the unit economics don't work. No customer is willing to pay the true price of the food, the delivery and even very minimal overhead. If they charged enough to break even, the demand would completely fall out.
But in the account identity settings I have to give them a backup email address that they can use to verify my identity in case of issues. That backup email address never gets any email, definitely isn't worth paying for, and is obviously a gmail address.
I thought food delivery services were profitable on a per unit basis, it was just the marketing/development spend that was causing them to go into the red?
What doesn't seem to work, which is a bit surprising, is centralizing the deliveries to reduce costs.
The delivery services should be making their money out of those centralized cost savings, but can't. So instead it's coming out of the food, which means the restaurants rise their prices, etc.
My local chippy has four different prices depending on which platform you order it through, which vary by up to 60%!
The same item:
Deliveroo - £11.99 (centralized search, centralized delivery)
Uber Eats - £11.99 (centralized search, centralized delivery)
Just Eat - £9.99 (centralized search, restaurant delivers)
Preoday - £7.99 (restaurant website, restaurant delivery)
Preoday- £7.49 (restaurant website, you collect)
Why they can't make money out of the centralization is the real question. I know in the UK they seem to be spending huge amounts on prime-time advertising. Central office headcount could be another reason. Call me cynical but I would also bet a lot of takeaways would avoid a lot of tax on cash orders, which you just can't do when it's all recorded electronically.
If a customer orders $10 worth of food and sees another $10 of fees, their interest in it decreases significantly - and they have many alternative ways to get food with less overhead.
You're right about restaurant-specific options though. The economics are somewhat different and may work out more favorably, though I still suspect they're taking losses for the sake of gaining customer interest. There's no way delivery costs them half a pound!
If anything happens to my Google account it has no effect to my business. I might get locked out of the Play store if I won't be able to register another account with the same phone number. The worst it happens is that I have to get a new number which actually is a lot of work (banks, etc.) Does that happen?
Anyway, the less I use my account the less problems I should have, so no Gmail.
Both companies are raking in money. As the article points out, Google uses gmail to sell more profitable business products. Alphabet Inc made $75 billion profit, so if it costs them $5 per user to run, it will be about a $10 billion cost.
Which is a fraction of their profit - and makes for great advertising.
I have said this many times: the Internet, as it bloomed starting around 1990 or so, was built on someone else's hardware. Usenet, sure. If you were on IRC at the time, chances are your IRC servers were .edu servers. At first the "someone else's hardware" (SEH) was largely from universities, who often had no real top-down policies about how their bandwidth and such were used. Many SPARCs were pressed into service.
Roughly a quarter of a second after the invention of the <img> tag, advertising began to be a thing. Anyone remember NetZero? The banner era began, then animated .GIFs were added, and finally the CPU-crushing Flash banner evolved. Take a moment to remember NetZero, as well as the free hours on AOL discs so numerous the US postal service shuddered.
About a thousand people invented AJAX as soon as they realized the implications of the XMLHttpRequest object. Just as the <img> tag was the four-color print for advertising, so this began an era where, with the addition of cookies, you could get more information about how your ads were received, how your viewer moved across domains, and so on. This in turn means you can ask for more money for advertising, after all you can target and track! Before it was merely exposure.
Ah, but how to know more? Well, for one, you could have the users host all of their content on your servers. First email, then photos, then video. Why not? And it's all for free. We just need to perform sophisticated analysis on your content, then decide to show you this Viagra ad anyway. This more or less ends at Cloud Computing.
I submit that the various frees and SEHs have created radical distortions in the mindset of generations when it comes to "Who pays for this, anyway?" It's certainly devalued some kinds of labor, overvalued others, and probably has some knock-on effects that we might not even immediately notice. I think the need for Cloudflare and other anti-DDoS products stems from the overly casual egress filtering of various ISPs. It's all just free stuff, anyway, let someone else pay for it. Email is "free," and we've largely dealt with spam by building some great machinery (eventually) and hiding it away from everyone, but its big brother, Internet Scam Sam, continues to slither along. We now build to scale and simply make tech support some forum where the users attempt to solve each other's problems -- they're not even interns.
I could go on and on, but my key point is that thirty-plus years of "free" has translated to "someone else's problem" and I wonder if we aren't starting to see some bills come due at last.
This is just a natural consequence of IPs lack of a security model or access controls. If OSI had won we would be living in a world with locked down data services.
It seemed like a great idea that had never really taken off, some of the "layers" just didn't map to reality.
I could easily see myself having to pay $30 a month or more for all the services that are probably funded by spying on me, if they had to use a different business model.
It's fairly bad and unsustainable to build a business around trying to get people to argue more online, so they look at your ads to buy absolute crap they don't even want, but I'm not sure what the web would look like without it.
Would we still have all the random things like Google Street View that nobody would actually pay enough for as a discrete product?
Reputable news sources seem to have already changed from ads to paywalls, presumably because ads were making the sites look too much like tabloids.
Plus there's Assistant, Calendar, Tile tracking(Already a few bucks a month for proactive reminders), Keep, YoLink's cloud, WiFi Camera clouds, etc.
Some of it could be done P2P(Especially Google Assistant which only has about 5 features people use), some things would probably disappear entirely in a privacy first world, and I'm guessing the rest would be an extra $10-$30 or so to.
I think this is the problem with big tech right now. We all know an email service doesn’t cost 30/month and generate hundred billion dollar companies with $300k programmer salaries. But adtech makes it so.
The only goal of GDPR is to stop the theft of personal information, it doesn't dictate a business model.
Plus, the GDPR doesn't allow tracking as a precondition for using the service. Which is needed for the law to mean anything at all, otherwise all the big companies would require it and you'd be disadvantaged if you refuse, but it does change the business model.
It seems like an unsolvable problem, short of some kind of government funded subsidized open source equivalent of Google or something.
The real trouble is from even stronger laws than the GDPR that many individuals want. I'm not exactly sure what the wording of those imaginary laws would be, but a huge number of people did not want Amazon Sidewalk to happen, especially as opt-out, many want tile/AirTag to stop, some people want CCTV to be totally gone, etc.
I had to finally cave in last week and pony up to get rid of the "You are using 98% of your storage space!" banner across the top of my Gmail.
That's laughable - When Gmail was launched, it advertised that it would show you "relevant" text ads based on your email! That was one of its features in an era of intrusive banner and pop-up ads in many of the free email services available in the past.
While the article may have a point about Alexa and Google Cloud, Gmail cannot be clubbed with it as Gmail does have 2 viable business model - advertisements and subscriptions. Moreover, it is a virtual goldmine of personal data for any advertising platform with your banking statements, your online purchases, your work emails, your personal correspondences, your contacts etc. Anybody who believes Google isn't mining this data is living in a fool's paradise. Unless a law explicitly forbids it, with severe penalties, corporations like Google will absolutely use this data to make money - just look at the fines Google faces around the world for violating the privacy of its users.
Edit: Hell, Google can't keep a secret anymore without leaking it. If what you're saying were true then any employee working on the pipelines and ad targeting would easily get the evidence themselves, and sue Google. Google pays well, but not as well as winning a lawsuit.
All I can do is assume that unless they say that it doesn't, then it probably does.
But if they do say that it doesn't, then I'm pretty sure it doesn't. Because especially now with GDPR they'd be completely fucked if that were not true. Max penalty 4% of global revenue per instance, or whatever it is.
Google even allows you to opt out of personalized ads. Not hard to find.
You just saved me $5 per month. Happy holidays.
I don't think that's true. Everyone I know who used custom domains with Gmail migrated away. No one paid, Google priced it just high enough that people could justify spending the time migrating.
There might have been a solution where you could keep the custom domain, if you used it for email only, but the messaging was really confusing, and many had already migrated away at that point. There may also have been issues if you hosted email for others. In my case I had my own email and that of a few family members, it wasn't clear that I could keep all the email account, or just my own. In the end I think many didn't want to deal with Google after this and just moved their domains.
Fastmail has been around for ages, much longer than protonmail, even longer than Gmail, and is completely no-nonsense. Good apps and a good web interface.
Also:
“Fastmail developers are among active contributors to the widely used Cyrus IMAP open source software project and include the lead developer and maintainer of Perl module Mail::IMAPTalk. Fastmail supported the development of the free software webmail interface Roundcube and developed JMAP – a new open email protocol.”
https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about-us/our-portfolios/natio...
https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/06/protonmail-logged-ip-addre...
First time I've heard this, can you expand on it?
I'm claiming that neither of them are good for privacy. As a sibling wrote so well: "encrypted email just isn’t a thing. The minute you send a message to someone else it’s out in the wild."
I have zero interest in my email being encrypted or protected or anonymous. So ProtonMail's value proposition is meaningless to me. But the fact that ProtonMail masquerades and markets their email as private and encrypted is the problem. They're subject to subpoenas, just like everyone else, and if they are going to market their service as private, encrypted, or anonymous, then they are misleading at best and lying at worst:
https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/06/protonmail-logged-ip-addre...
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/05/how-protonmail-lost-th...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonVPN/comments/8ww4h2/comment/e...
Lots of other interesting dirt if you do some basic google searches.
So I chose Fastmail because of their honesty. I know what I'm getting. Their prices are great, apps are great, web interface is great. They've been around since 1999 -- longer than Gmail. I used their free tier first then moved to paid with a custom name some time ago. Clearly they're not going anywhere. I'm not sure what else you can ask for in an email provider?
I do different usernames@same.domain to make filtering into folder/labels easier too.
Personally I use mailbox.org and have no issues. Fastmail seems to be a very popular option here.
It's likely that a lot of these will probably lack certain features Gmail has such as auto-categorising emails (partially due to the fact that they are not in the business of scanning your emails in the first place). I'm not sure if there are open-source tools to replace those features.
Personally, my approach would be to focus on reducing the junk mail. Moving to a new email address would give you a clean slate, at least. You can also look into AnonAddy or SimpleLogin to help prevent spam in future.
My prediction is when they stop growing exponentially the investments will instead become huge profits.
Just start charging for gmail. Problem fixed.
"Can't be monetized": news shouldn't be monetized, and neither should personal assistants that tie together personal data and control of vital home systems.
VAs are an operating system for all of the other products and services. You give away the printer or the razor handle, and charge for ink and razor blades. You give away the personal assistant, and charge for voices, ringtones, music, movies, groceries, apps, alarms, security features, and so on.
If you're spending billions upon billions running a VA that's stagnant and not very good, then you suck as a CIO/CTO and shouldn't be trusted with that sort of budget.