Gmail is the gateway to their entire product portfolio; no way they’d kill it.
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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All it takes is one MBA with little foresight in the wrong position - the Gmail team is all expense (server hosting, labor), and no revenue; that's the "Ads" and "Drive/One/Business" teams.
The MBA. The only graduate degree you can get by attending class 3 days a month.
How some of these MBA programs can be considered a “masters” degree is an insult to people who actually had to spend years on 40-70hour a week graduate programs.
The program cost for the executive MBA class entering in July 2023 was $205,897, which includes tuition, required electronic textbooks, hotel accommodations during immersion weeks and core course sessions in terms 1-3, administrative fees, and most meals during residence periods.
(Emphasis mine)
They are just straight up purchasing a degree at this price point.
Pretty much. There are cheaper alternative, but there are lots of ways to get a “masters” while still being able to hold down a 9 to 5.
No fucking way I could work while doing my masters in interaction design. Only way to way to do that was to take out a student loan because the program required even more commitment than full time undergraduate course work.
Remember. There is no such thing as free. They’re data mining the hell out of your email. You can rest assured that gmail is a revenue generator. Just in ways you don’t see.
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You are awfully confident about a company that kills things like a Russian dictator. I think what perhaps you mean is there's no way they'd kill it now. If they wanted to push users to some different type of platform they would certainly entertain the idea.
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Google getting rid of gmail would have to be hands down one of the biggest internet shakeups since its inception. Gmail has been the de facto free email service for almost two decades now. They have like a 53% market share of emails in the U.S.
Also the shitstorm it would cause, when you can't access an account that you used Gmail to sign up.
Maybe it would finally force the surprising number of websites out there that don't allow for email changes to change their policies. I recently switched every account I could to a personal domain and I couldn't believe how many just don't allow for it.
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With the terms of service for their “anti spam” and “productivity auto-sorting” features, they must gather SO much data about people by reading their emails - there’s no way they’d turn that off lol
Ugh, I've gotta switch from Gmail, any good email recommendations?
Proton mail is the peak email service money can buy (it's also avilable for free but i suggest paying)
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I mean... I don't expect them to scrap GMail, but their reassurance means nothing. IIRC they said the same thing about Stadia.
They make too much money from data harvesting to scrap Gmail, though.
Stadia was destined to fail though. I still remember the key note in which it was introduced. The CEO started with the lines "I don't play many games, but ... ".
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Why would they voluntarily lose access to all my personal information?
They have enough to train an AI version of you and already predict your actions. Tracking real you is just boring now.
For the time being the compute required to simulate me is more expensive than tracking the real me.
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I just now created a Proton mail account just minutes before seeing this. I think I'm glad I did.
I've been thinking about de-googling myself for some time now. After being with them since they created the Gmail service in the early 2000s, I practically have my whole adult life on Google. I've been using drive and photos as well for as long as it has existed. It's going to be a lot of work to sort through all of this data and start over on a new service.
I don't trust Google anymore over anything. Whether it's privacy (though I was pretty naive to think I had any in the first place) or their ability to keep a service up long enough for anyone to commit.
It's a shame because they started as a really nice company with their do no evil motto with great services and then everything went to shit. Even their killer feature, the search engine, has become complete shit.
I agree, but just a counterpoint...
Back in the day, after Hotmail and Yahoo! email but before Gmail, people started becoming really skeptical of emails from @xyz.net and started treating anything that didn't come from a major email provider as "spam."
I've kept my old gmail accounts around for "spam" and "work" respectively because despite people (finally) waking up to the privacy issues of Gmail, I cannot trust that emails with a @protonmail.com address won't be viewed skeptically by people recieving the email. Especially in regards to jobs. Unless you're in Cybersecurity and taking privacy seriously is your professional obligation, you're not going to run into tons of people who view ProtonMail very favorably.
De-googling is good, but don't leave yourself stranded and ignored by people because you had the audacity to use a different fucking service.
I'd wager most people who don't think about cyber security even look at the sender email address these days.
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Killing Gmail would be like killing search or youtube, they would NOT dare.
Yeah, I'd drop Fi, Pixle, and use of Google in a second. Gmail is the backbone of everything Google is. Had it since day 1 and will have it until it disappears, and then I will disappear into the woods forever.
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It's funny that most comments here are debating this seriously when the article (that apparently nobody bothered to read) clearly says it was a hoax.
Doesn't matter. It's in the aether now that "Google promised Gmail won't go anywhere," so it will definitely be eliminated. People believing a Google product won't be discontinued is the Google product kiss of death.
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Any of these large business coming out to explicitly say "this will not happen" is concerning.
Especially Google who is famous for randomly getting bored of developing and then suddenly cancelling services
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Gmail is untouchable. That more than any other product has kept me tethered to Google since 2004. That being said I wouldn't be surprised if some greedy, future regime at Google botches it up.
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The biggest thing holding me to Google is Gmail and photos.
They scrap Gmail and I'm literally out. No more Google accounts, except to use an android.
Google offers very little value to the consumer these days
I bought a domain and started using it for all my email last year. It’s the best and I suggest it to everyone.
The combination of your own domain, Fastmail, and Bitwarden is powerful.
You can move email services by changing a few DNS records and Fastmail has an API that Bitwarden hits to create new masked email addresses using your domain so every site gets a different email address. Start getting spam? You know exactly who leaked/sold your info and you can now send that address right to the trash.
Is google photos free?
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One thing that's very clear to me is that when a tech company says something is "here to stay," it doesn't actually mean it's here to stay.
I’m starting to worry Lemmy users read the article at a lower rate than redditors.
Of course it is. I know Google scraps a lot of things, but Gmail is for the most part liked and, far more importantly to Google, is an absolute treasure trove of personalised, easily parsable data, yet nowhere near as costly to maintain as, say, YouTube.
The fact that after making search, an email provider was their next big project, shows how serious they are about it.
Why does anyone think Google would shut down Gmail? You'd have to be stupid to think that they would shut down the most used email service on earth, one that is deeply integrated into Google as an ecosystem.
Google does have a reputation for unnecessary and/or prematurely killing everything it makes so I wouldn't blame people for believing an email that looked like it was from Google saying that Gmail is shutting down in August
They shut down services that aren’t profitable. Gmail is highly profitable as it’s an important lever to identify people’s interests, which they use to sell ads at a higher price. They’d have to be stupid to shut it down.
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This would really be the ultimate fuck you to everyone if they did this. I sort of wish they would so we'd all stop giving them all our personal data.
Exactly what a company about to shut down their email product would say.
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Stupid question: what the shit do you do with your 15 years of communication history if your email provider falls off a cliff?
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Oh thank goodness. Ya know I trust Google, when Google speaks it's always true. They're very not evil. And this definitely isn't a fun way to lessen the blow of an announcement that would be so.. displeasing to the masses.
/$
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I fully expect GMail to be enshittified in the future.
"GMail through gmail.com and GMail App: Always Free"
"GMail Pro (IMAP/POP/Forwarding): Only $3.99 / mo"
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RIP Inbox.
Why do I feel like them saying this makes it MORE likely theyre going to shut it down?
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