I'm always amazed by people with your perspective! I hated Gmail from the beginning, it works terribly with IMAP, and it's generally slow compared to a good native app.
Google search is still occasionally better than DDG, but it's never more than an !g away if I'm unhappy with DDG.
What are all these services Google provides people feel are irreplaceable? I don't get it. They're an advertising company with big bags of money to let smart people noodle around on their pet projects. Nice company to work for (if you aren't morally opposed to advertising), but I've never found the products appealing.
As far as gmail goes, I don't know if it is now widespread, but one day my gmail suddenly had different tabs for primary, social media, promotions, updates, and forums, and it changed my life. I hate using other mail apps that don't do that. Can't ever find anything.
I think they introduced that 3 or 4 years ago. There are multiple inbox views you can select from in the settings menus. I do like that system but it's not very valuable to me. I get quite a lot of email but I tend to deal with it all as soon as it arrives.
I understand, but before that was implemented I was really bad about answering emails because so many of them were garbage. Now I only have to look at the garbage if I want to (because I am addicted to massdrop)
I'll be honest. Google Search is better for certain things. For example it's nice getting those little boxes at the top of the page that answer your question without you even needing to follow a link but I can afford the extra few seconds it takes to click a link every now and then in exchange for better privacy and results that aren't manipulated based on data the search engine holds on me.
As for Gmail that was a recent switch. I'm currently forwarding all mail to my iCloud account and using that. As I rarely use the Gmail web app (I only use desktop/mobile apps to access mail) the switch has been seamless.
For me the final straw was looking at my 'activity' page on Google. Despite having turned it off web history was on. I presume they asked me to click something someday and I wasn't careful enough but that was very annoying. They've also changed the web history interface to make it pretty complicated to figure out how to delete everything. I then noticed they had location tracking on (which I also specifically disabled in the past). I couldn't find a way to delete all of that and had to delete each record individually.
Google wants to do some cool stuff with all this data but it certainly isn't doing anything that makes it worth it for me to give up my privacy.
Google is still the best search engine, but in my opinion gmail isn't that big of a deal anymore. They were revolutionary in their time and are still very good, but there are great alternatives by now.
I'm serious. I have a gmail account for spam signups, and i log in sometimes, but I didn't find anything that it gives me over my setup.
The only thing I can think of is the initial setup I had to do to get everything done, but that's a few hours of work and it's here now. Using it for years without having to do anything. Some friends of mine use it, and my family, and nobody complains. Ever.
Google search is still occasionally better than DDG, but it's never more than an !g away if I'm unhappy with DDG.
What are all these services Google provides people feel are irreplaceable? I don't get it. They're an advertising company with big bags of money to let smart people noodle around on their pet projects. Nice company to work for (if you aren't morally opposed to advertising), but I've never found the products appealing.