The counterpoint is that their strategy is burning trust in their brand. New products depend on early adopters to mature and grow. But I’ve been burned by Google’s product ADHD so many times now that I refuse to be an early adopter of any of their products. If gmail came out today, I’d assume it would be shut down in a few years and I wouldn’t touch it. The only Google products I’d use today are Android, Chrome, Search, Gmail and sometimes firebase or Meet. I think Google meet is the only thing in that list less than 10 years old. (And even then it’s just rebranded Hangouts).
Every time Google shuts down a product, they hurt their reputation. They’re pissing in the pool that future Google products need to survive. At this point I don’t know if Google can make successful new products because nobody trusts their follow through.
Yes, completely agree, same here. I don't touch Google products any more, and it's mostly because I don't trust they will remain available.
I only use the products that are very unlikely to go away quickly. Search, Gmail and Android. I'd like to get off Gmail for other reasons, but it's a pain. And I mostly use DuckDuckGo for search these days.
> I'd like to get off Gmail for other reasons, but it's a pain.
I used to think that, but I was actually surprised how easy it was to get off GMail. I gave Fastmail my credit card number, clicked a few buttons in their UI to get my mail transferred over, moved my MX records, and I was done. I ended up migrating contacts, too, but that was just a couple more clicks in Fastmail's UI, as they have an OAuth flow that interacts directly with Google's APIs.
I still haven't migrated my calendar, and a few other email-adjacent things, but it's fine; it can all operate this way until I'm ready.
Edit: right after posting, realized you might be using an @gmail.com address, so yeah, migrating off GMail in that case is much harder than if you have a custom domain.
I've always used a custom domain not with google, but the reason I would find it hard to get off gmail is the list of sites that only offer a 'login with gmail' with the only alternative being 'login with facebook'. And the list is getting consistently bigger, with many developers getting in on the trend of "passwords are too risky, just let Google handle it". If there is ever a day Google turns off sso for free Gmail users it will be a big one.
Wow, really? I have only once run into a website that does not accept signup with simple email/password (crates.io, of all things, which requires a GitHub login). Not saying they don't exist, and it sucks that you've run into them and needed them, but I'm really surprised.
Beyond that, especially given that I assume (hope?) such sites are rare, a simple workaround would be to have a GMail account just for such signups, and set it up to forward to your main mail account hosted elsewhere. I think that's a pretty small price to pay if you really do want to get off GMail.
In my case, I still have my GSuite (or Google Workspaces or whatever they hell they're calling it now) account (really the only difference is now my MX records point somewhere else), so if I did have any sites left where I hadn't switched from Google auth to email/password auth, it would still work.
I can think of only three or four times in the last 5 years I've encountered sites that only offer third party SSO, and all of them I decided as not being worth my time. It's about as many as have decided that magic links are a sign in option they want. Sites are thankfully hesitant to play around too much with sign up options that might exclude some users
Every time Google shuts down a product, they hurt their reputation. They’re pissing in the pool that future Google products need to survive. At this point I don’t know if Google can make successful new products because nobody trusts their follow through.