Slashdot Mirror
The Case Against Gmail
stry_cat writes "Ed Bot makes the case against Gmail: 'Gmail was a breath of fresh air when it debuted. But this onetime alternative is showing signs that it's past its prime, especially if you want to use the service with a third-party client. That's the way Google wants it, which is why I've given up on Gmail after almost a decade.' Personally, I've always thought it odd that no other email provider ever adopted Gmails "search not sort" mentality. I've been a Gmail user since you needed an invitation to get an account. However Gmail has been steadily moving towards a more traditional email experience. Plus there's the iGoogle disaster that got me looking into alternatives to everything Google."
stry_cat knows hyperbole. "Disaster"? Seriously? I used iGoogle for years. Then Google said "it'll be going away in year." So, I found an alternative. Disaster averted.
So his main issue with gmail....
"It doesn't work with Exchange Active Sync"
And that's google's fault? My guess is that MS stopped allowing it easy access HOPING people would move over to outlook.com (as he did, because he was "getting scroogled" cause we ALL know MS has NEVER used target advertising. etc etc)
he complains that you should be able to easily access it from a browser, or a native app... Ermmmm... Works just fine for me from a browser and from apps on iOS and Android devices for me... (I don't believe in WinMo.. they sucked, they annoyed me, i'll never trust them again...)
Even works fine on Blackberry....
Soooo... "MOVE TO OUTLOOK.COM Don't get Scroogled...." thanks for the look MS... oh yea, use bing.com, it's AWESOME..
I am 31337 or something.
Ed Bott has been sucking the Microsoft tit for years and he loves it. But don't believe me, go check his articles up on ZDnet and see just how many of them cover all things Microsoft.
In one of his articles he tells us just how much he loves Outlook.com. Link provided for convenience:
http://www.zdnet.com/why-i-use-outlook-com-for-my-custom-email-accounts-and-how-you-can-too-7000015546/
That's a failing of Google. They're the kings of search, so everything should be searchable, right? So they extended that to everything should be searched - always. Want to know who batted third in the fourth game of the World Series? Search for it. Want to know who sent you that email? Search for them. Want to run a program? Search for it.
What they don't acknowledge is that people grow habits. Once we've learned a thing, we can repeat the thing pretty easily. I don't have to "search" for Excel on my PC, I know that if I click down here, then up and over here, I see the little [X~] icon. I don't open the search bar and type Excel. And I never open the search bar and type Excel.
Microsoft, in their traditionally incompetent fashion of misunderstanding their users, decided to mimic Google's unacknowledged mistakes when they came out with Windows 8. (Unity, of course, had beaten them to the punch in incompetence, as they so often do.) Apple figured it out better when they tied search to the home screen on the iPhones, but wisely kept it out of sight. Most people drag their two-dozen useful icons to the first few pages of their iPhone, and use search only when they've forgotten which folder they hid their AnimeTube player in.
Perhaps the reason GMail (beta) remained beta for so long was that they were running experiments on people. Maybe they wanted to see if people would ever adapt to their notions of "search". And maybe they finally tallied up the results, and recognized how stupid they were to believe it in the first place.
John
What alternative? All the similar ones I don't really trust with my account information.
My company (~750 email users) bought in to the Office 365 hype while negotiating our MS licensing. We got it super cheap and thought "What the hell, 'free' DR and a cloud service to offer the end users? Why not?"... That was a year ago. In the year since that decision and 8 months in to using the product, I can say without a doubt that Office 365 is the worst email system I've ever used. Hands down, the absolute worst. Spam filtering problems? Yep, had those. Mail delivery problems? Yep, about 3 times a month (on average). Client connectivity issues? Oh yeah. Management site unavailable? It's happened more than once. 4-hour hold for "free" support? Yep, been through that too.
It's bad enough that we're spending the money to move all of our cloud mailboxes back on-prem. I can't expect that ANYONE with an expectation for highly available mail systems would use Office 365. I'll offer further details in a PM if anyone needs it.
America is all about speed. Hot, nasty, badass speed. -Eleanor Roosevelt, 1936