Nobody is freeloading.
Again:
People pay for Google's consumer offerings with personal information.
Again:
People pay for Google's consumer offerings with personal information.
It's a free service. People who offer free services owe you nothing. Your sense of entitlement is sorely misplaced.
Google has to pay Microsoft actual money for Active Sync. If this is not economically viable, then they can't continue paying money out of their own pocket for you to freeload.
Your offering of personal information is just not paying the bills, sorry.
1) You sign up for Gmail
2) Google starts data mining all of your e-mail, scouring it for any type of keywords as well as using algorithms to determine your age, gender, sexuality, married, location, if you like Mac or PC, what mobile phone you have, what diseases you may have, etc... Remember this is on a HUGE scale and they can easily uniquely identify you using many methods.
3) Remember, that if you leave yourself logged in and then go to do a search on Google, they log that information too, they also log the information from you on YouTube or any other of their properties.
4) They now have all this information and they track you using cookies. So when you get to a site that uses Adwords or Double Click Google has a VERY good idea about what type of ads to place on that page to entice you to click on one of them.
5) Profit
Unfortunately, there's quite a large number of people out there who don't know what Google's doing. Just so you know the personal information IS paying the bills in a HUGE way. Google gets > 90% of all revenue from advertising. You seem to fall into that group. Please educate yourself and also try not to call people stupid as sometimes you MIGHT be wrong yourself.
Also, just so you know, the reason that Google is stopping EAS for personal Gmail accounts is to attempt to cripple the Windows Phone before it has a chance to take off. It's a shrewd business move and once again, it has nothing to do with economics.
Got a source for that statement? For all we know, this could be related to the lawsuit following Motorola and Microsoft not being able to agree on the per-phone fee for ActiveSync. If the ActiveSync servers require a license per connected user (Client Access License), that would certainly seem like a valid cause for this decision.