I joined Gmail during the beta in 2004, when it was by invitation only. I fought hard for my invitation, combing my network until I found someone in the tech publishing world that was willing to send me one.
A full gigabyte for email. For free! Imagine! Obviously it would never fill up!
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I’ve been a Google shop over here for a long time. As an OSS contributor and evangelist, their first motto, “Don’t be evil,” resonated with me, and as time went on and they offered more services, I adopted more services.
Fast forward to the present day and I use Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Voice, Google Photos, Google Maps, Chrome, Chrome OS, Android, and Google Fiber and have for a long time. There isn’t a single item in that list I’ve been using for less than a decade. I even pay Google for extra storage. While they existed, I also used Google Wave and Google Plus.
Even when I realized that things weren’t going to last forever, when they changed their motto away from “Don’t be evil” (has there ever been a more “they’ll tell you who they are” move in all of business history?) I stuck with Google stuff, if only as the result of inertia.
I mean, my main Gmail box, that one that goes all the way back to 2004, has been used through two graduate degrees, multiple books written, and many freelance and work projects. It’s subscribed to mailing lists and is a kind of archive of my adult life. It’s got nearly a million messages in it (hence me paying for extra storage).
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Today I opened a Fastmail account. I’ve been moving other parts of my life to AWS.
The sale of Google Fiber and the end of support for “send as” in Gmail are just it for me. I’ve had enough. I have multiple email addresses going back years, including multiple .edu addresses, and I receive on them all and don’t plan to stop. If Google was going to allow us to provide an alternate SMTP service, I probably would have stuck with it using a Sendgrid plan or something like that.
But no. That’s not how Google does things. They disappear things. Like they did with Wave and Plus. Like they’re doing with Chrome OS. And yes, they will still allow some support if you upgrade to Workspace, but it’s not cost effective for what I need and they don’t provide any migration options for Gmail-to-Gmail, ironically. So I’d have to nurse along a huge export and reimport using probably IMAP. Obviously an LLM could just take care of it for me, but at a million messages, that’s probably many days of throttling and fighting.
I haven’t liked their UX in a long time, but now that I also have to find other providers for things anyway, it’s just time.
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I think Google is dying.
Obviously there’s the fact that they’re having quarters in the red and their search business is no longer the dominant force in the tech economy. But there are other signs. Like selling off Fiber. Like enshittifying Gmail. Like all the extra crap they increasingly add to Android themselves.
They’re not just in that part of the cycle where they enshittify, they’re in that part of the cycle where they enshittify because think these things aren’t worth doing any longer, so they’re just going to punish anyone still using them.
I get it. They want to focus on Cloud and AI.
Only their AI is enterprise only via Vertex/Gemini Enterprise. Yeah, okay, they claim to have a consumer offering, but it sucks. I should have been an ideal Gemini bundle customer but I stopped using it soon after trying it because Anthropic and OpenAI were both light years ahead, and that’s still the case. There were seven months between 3.1 Pro and 4 Argon. I haven’t tried Argon yet, but Google’s just too late. Under no circumstances should I have better inference *under my office desk* than I can pay for at Google, and yet that’s been the case for months.
Qwen 3.5 122B was better behaved and more capable for agentic than Gemini from day one, and Qwen 3.8 Flash Next put every Gemini 3.x release absolutely to shame. The fact that I didn’t even realize that Argon had been released until tonight (days later) pretty much tells me what I need to know about it.
Meanwhile, Google’s claiming there are massive Cloud gains, but nobody in the industry takes Google Cloud seriously because it’s an unstable, fractious mess. The growth they’re “seeing” comes from a drug-pusher approach. They offered thousands in free Cloud services credits to anyone willing to build things in Cloud this year, getting smaller orgs and devs hooked on Google services in the short term by virtue of the fact that they built in Google Cloud to take advantage of the fact that Google was giving tons of it away. But they won’t stay long.
I even went and got me a few thousand in Google Cloud credits but then ended up not using them because the only thing I really have cared to work on this year that would have been of interest was AI, Gemini 3.x wasn’t even useful with thousands in free APi credits. It couldn’t code reliably or use tools reliably, and it hallucinated on almost every turn.
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Anyway, who knows, maybe Google isn’t dying and I’m just wrong. But it’s dying to me. I’m switching out of Gmail. Which probably implies a switch away from Calendar and Drive as well. I’ve played with OwnCloud some and I suspect that’s where we’re going to go. Another ThinkCentre m93p Tiny to stack up and put to work.
The funny thing is that I’d happily pay Google for things, but they either don’t have things I want to buy (in the case of AI) or they don’t want to sell what I’m willing to pay for (in the case of send-as capable Gmail accounts and fiber to my dwelling).
So now I’m paying Fastmail and AWS (and probably soon others besides).
Google is doing what IBM once did. Decide it doesn’t want consumers’ money and is going to focus on enterprise. Which basically means it’s already an also-ran, the next IBM.
Anyway, end of an era. See you later, Google.