[vertex-four]

Of course, most competition also died. In terms of free email, there's now... I think Outlook.com is the only one I see semi-regularly? Yahoo's email service is utterly dreadful and I seem to remember a lot of kerfuffle regarding them and mailing lists.

[yahoooooo]

No one I'm friends with uses yahoo, but out of a class I taught of 160 university students, I'd say about 20% of those who actually emailed me were using yahoo.com.

And for older folk, I still see plenty of @aol and @<serviceprovider> addresses.

Don't mistake what youre friends are doing for what the world as a whole is doing!

[avar]

Most of the competition deserved to die. At the time 10-50MB mailboxes were normal, and Google came out with 1GB (and counting!) from day one, along with a much better UI than everyone else, and kick-ass spam filters.

Nobody's done much more than reach parity with GMail since then, so there's been no big incentive to switch back.

[adventured]

What meaningful competition was there before? What high quality, amazing service did GMail smash?

Yahoo Mail and Hotmail were terrible then, and they're still mostly terrible now.

[vertex-four]

I'm not suggesting that there was meaningful competition before - just that there's no meaningful competition now, contrary to the comment I was replying to which asserted that "the competition got serious".

[msh]

hmm outlook.com and fastmail looks meaningful to me.

[nickik]

I never understood why people are hating on big companys that produce great effects and big market share. I can understanding people hatin horrible IE6, but gmail was and is fantastic and most people love it. Noting is stopping them from leaving to other provider (and there are still many other) but they are happy.

So why is everything that has big market shares bad?

How about we switch to a model where we gat bad at companys that are actually selling us shitty products instead.

[vertex-four]

I'm not getting mad at anything. I'm responding to "the competition got serious" - no it didn't, that's an outright lie. The competition died.

In any case, it's bad because it means that if I don't want to agree to Google's terms of service for whatever reason or just don't want to interact with them as a company (perhaps I disagree with some corporate policy of theirs), then I have to either deal with a worse experience, self-host, or pay money to a company like FastMail. If there were reasonable competition, I and many others could use them, and Google would have to convince us not to switch.

[nickik]

Are you really claming that there is not a single accaptable email hoster, even for money anywhere on the internet?

Even if there is no good one, there CLEAR are still many, many others that you can use.

Edit: Competiton is not defined as same service at same price. All email services compete with each other, gmail did not kill the competition or the market they just offered the best system on one price range. You are basiclly complaining that others that have diffrent privacy policy are not as good or cheap as gmail.

You offered this as a response to somebody saying that google was good for the market, but they clearly were. You get better free email in most aspects and you still have tons of other options including the old shitty free email providers.

These post feel like a bad accuse to find a reason to hate on google, or maybe im misunderstanding you.

[tatterdemalion]

That is explicitly not what the parent poster was claiming.

[nickik]

Are you really claming that there is not a single accaptable email hoster, even for money anywhere on the internet?

Even if there is no good one, there CLEAR are still many, many others that you can use.

Edit: Competiton is not defined as same service at same price. All email services compete with each other, gmail did not kill the competition or the market they just offered the best system on one price range. You are basiclly complaining that others that have diffrent privacy policy are not as good or cheap as gmail.

You offered this as a response to somebody saying that google was good for the market, but they clearly were. You get better free email in most aspects and you still have tons of other options including the old shitty free email providers.

These post feel like a bad accuse to find a reason to hate on google, or maybe im misunderstanding you.

[vertex-four]

> You offered this as a response to somebody saying that google was good for the market, but they clearly were.

Look. If I have a measurably worse email system, and email is a central part of workflow in my industry, then I am not able to compete as well as those who have measurably better email systems.

You could argue that there are equally good email systems, or that there's no possible reason that I could possibly want to not use Google's email system. That would be valid and constructive.