Just to play devil's advocate: the vast majority of (even technical) people have no interest in running a mail server. Who should Google optimize for?
As a publicly traded company, it optimizes for GOOG. I have nothing against google, but I do think there is not enough skepticism our fear about them eating the whole stack.
* Receive gmail link from friend. * Use Chrome Browser as gateway to internet. * Use DNS to resolve that URL. * Site built on Angular and has new SPDY tags. * Libraries and Fonts served from CDN.
see something unclear at the url.
* use google search to find that link * google analytics beacons on both websites report your traffic.
I am concerned about the temptation for google to get up to something naughty. Luckily, as we now, it is an undisputed fact that our data is 100% safe with google and there are no organizations trying to actively attack their network or intercede. We also know, that compromising an individual (either an employee or a customer of google) is 100% impossible, never has happened, and never conceivably could happen. So it isn't a big deal.
So, is the issue you can't run a mailserver? Maybe. Maybe not.
You can't crawl many valuable sites now, unless you are google bot or a big vendor.
2 (3 if we count microsoft) companies can ban you from competing on mobile.
etc.
The slight losses in some areas to optimize for what google wants are small. In aggregate, they are wildly irresponsible for us to accept and we shoudlnt.
False. The voting stock are not traded, so the founders still have irrevocable rights to do whatever they please.
I meant, and you correctly pointed out was not clear or a particularly good way to verbalize, that google like most companies does what is best for itself. In googles case this is a combination of maximizing shareholder value and the vision various thoughtleaders in the company have.
I do not believe google is evil or bad.
I used to believe this.
I now believe that google is doing a lot of great things. However by achieving horizontal success in almost every area of such a powerful concept, it effects how the landscape develops and does cause many issues.
Even if we accept google is mostly good, and I mostly do, it is concerning. I hope that their voluntary meta structure will allow them to distribute fault tolerance and limit power consolidation.
As far as "I take issue with Google making the decision that everyone is going to switch, now and with out sufficient warning." it would be nice to get some notice on these changes no doubt but email is shit. It just is but we are stuck with it and at least google is attempting to drag it forward even if in doing so they leave some outdated servers/services behind. I'll take more secure of infinitely backwards compatible any day.
So email is shitty because providers fuck with it at the mailserver level (i think this is the case, and have heard that about providers) as it doesn't seem to be a problem at the view level.
So this is sort of the issue. We couldn't get consensus on this early on, so no one was able to force standardization, now only a few players have the ability to define standards but they all own large scale messaging channels outside of email.
edit: meant to say that browsers obviously view html and css3 is pretty good as well. We could probably standardize this enough to allow people to write emails in this format and embed imagery. We would not allow JS for obvious reasons, but sending cool emails would be fun and we could also add new features. I mean, the web has developed somewhat shittily, but adding a few new features outside of like the 16 original tags would be cool. Not sure what percentage of tags and attributes actually work, but then again, no one is...
I don't think it needs to be changed, really. It will stay this useful forever, probably.
What does that mean? A mail server can be a small perl script running on an embedded computer, or it can be a hundred front-end SMTP servers using a database as a back end datastore, there's no real infrastructure limit other than being able to make and receive connections on TCP port 25.