Gmail wasn’t even the first, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, there were tons of free email offerings, even sites that would host your whole website for free like geocities. Gmail came into the market when 3rd party email being free was already well established. They just followed an Apple style of development, taking something that already exists and made a better version of it. Also back then their motto was still “Don’t Be Evil” and they mostly still kept to it, so they used that goodwill and the better user experience to grow it at a massive rate. And for the most part, its still the best experience for email for many cases.
In other news, water is wet. Honestly though, people expecting “free” services from big corpos are naive. What do they expect the servers and admins/devs are payed with?
Gmail was initially advertising funded while respecting privacy. It’s a false dichotomy to argue that a service can’t have a free privacy respecting offering. We’ve just become accustomed to accepting targeted advertising as the norm.
It’s a false dichotomy to argue that a service can’t have a free privacy respecting offering.
I don’t believe anyone is arguing that it’s technically impossible. But reality is pretty clear that it’s implausible. Targeted ads reel in too much money.
I think the real fallacy is getting used to services being free at all. You need to pay a monthly fee for basically every utility, but as soon as it’s in the digital world people expect that to change. What makes a search engine or mail provider so much different than your ISP or cable provider? You want competent services that respect your privacy? Pay for alternatives like Kagi and Proton.
I was under the impression that Google was giving me email out the kindness of their own heart.
