Apple's and Microsoft's business transactions(except for Bing) are upfront. You pay us this much money and you get this service. Google's is a more subtle "use this free service and we'll track your behavior and try to profit off it, if not we'll kill it".
>All of this could be so much more cost-efficient at scale. GMail may be a privacy concern, organizations' insistence on hosting their own email is maddeningly, mind-bogglingly wasteful considering they could get the same functionality for a few hundred bucks a year.
There are thousands of companies that host Exchange for you. Or you have Office 365.
>Someone needs to make a real open-source competitor to Exchange so people who insist on hosting their own stuff can at least stop throwing away money that could employ people on Exchange licenses.
Why should "someone" else waste a huge amount of their time and effort on something that you think should be done and given away for free?