> I hardly believe even more than 1% of email users even know about its federated nature
You're completely ignoring the corporate world, which may outweigh consumer email use (dunno, but it wouldn't surprise me.)
G Suite isn't even close to a monopoly, and I imagine there's large IT departments at anti-cloud corpos specifically for managing all their emails.
It's like, consumers don't know or care if they're using Linux, but they would definitely care if everything using it went away. Consumers aren't where Linux "won" either, it won on servers.
All this to say email is more centralized than it should be, but its decentralization is absolutely still important for its continued relevance.
If you take away the decentralization and Gmail were to become its own private messaging service, it would have the momentum to carry on for a while. But it would surely die. 5 years, maybe 10. But I have no doubt it would suffocate itself.
I know lawyers and founders who have Hotmail and AOL.com addresses, so I'd jump ship day one. One mass "Hey guys Gmail is bad here's my new email" to all my contacts (or as much as spam prevention allows...) and done.
I didn't say 1% of all email users are not gmail users. I said 1% know about its federated nature. Even if email allows for different email domains and there are entire departments are dedicated to manage domain emails, I thoroughly doubt even these people would even understand that this is what makes email "federated" or even call it that
gmail isn't a monopoly because of how they handle email. gmail is a monopoly because the common user doesn't know the difference most of the time
I mean, they may not know, but they'd understand a high level overview.
I on gmail can email someone at hotmail, outlook, yahoo, or any custom business email. I can do this because email is a common protocol that is shared amongst dozens of servers. That isn't deep technical knowledge, but they would get the gist of federation there if I segway'd to it.
>gmail isn't a monopoly because of how they handle email. gmail is a monopoly because the common user doesn't know the difference most of the time
Even my Grandma has a Yahoo account. She knows my Gmail address and can send me messages. I don't think Gmail is as synonymous with email as you think.
also as mentioned above: some 80% of people with a business email address probably knowws that there are more addresses than "@gmail.com".
You're completely ignoring the corporate world, which may outweigh consumer email use (dunno, but it wouldn't surprise me.)
G Suite isn't even close to a monopoly, and I imagine there's large IT departments at anti-cloud corpos specifically for managing all their emails.
It's like, consumers don't know or care if they're using Linux, but they would definitely care if everything using it went away. Consumers aren't where Linux "won" either, it won on servers.
All this to say email is more centralized than it should be, but its decentralization is absolutely still important for its continued relevance.
If you take away the decentralization and Gmail were to become its own private messaging service, it would have the momentum to carry on for a while. But it would surely die. 5 years, maybe 10. But I have no doubt it would suffocate itself.
I know lawyers and founders who have Hotmail and AOL.com addresses, so I'd jump ship day one. One mass "Hey guys Gmail is bad here's my new email" to all my contacts (or as much as spam prevention allows...) and done.