alt Hacker NewsI just don’t think your opinion is shared by most people.
Gmail is the most popular email service in the world, people are always telling me how they prefer Google Docs over everything else and their only competition is Microsoft.
Yes it’s free but there is no other service that I rather switch to, and I actually pay for additional storage.
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You can’t beat free. The Fastmail web interface is snappier than gmail. And you can’t beat dedicated mail clients like thunderbolt in terms of workflow.
Google doc is wordpad level with very good collaboration (but that’s mostly what people need). People were fine with typewriters, so they are fine with a word processor like google doc. But it’s not at the level of even Libreoffice or Apple’s page in terms of features.
By any definition of good usability, Gmail is not good and Google Docs are not far behind. It’s not that they are functionally bad, just really poor UX.
We probably talk to different sets of people, as I don't even know anybody who ever used Google Docs.
> Gmail is the most popular email service in the world
That's because it's been around for quite a while, and for a long time it was the best webmail service. It's also free, unlike most alternatives. And switching to a new provider means a new email address, unless you're using a custom domain with Google Workspace (or whatever they call it these days), which is a small minority of personal accounts.
(I gave up on Gmail a few years ago and switched to Fastmail, and like it much more than Gmail. But I'm the rare person who is willing to pay for email, and had been using a custom domain with Gmail, so my non-monetary switching costs were minimal.)