Or they're willing to take a loss on the ads -- which frankly don't make much money -- to go after the far more lucrative corporate emailing/calendaring market. The pricing is $5/$10/$higher per user-month, so walking away from an ads business that may possibly (but I doubt it) be earning hundreds of millions to avoid a cloud over your sales process for the aforementioned multi-billion dollar business seems like a solid trade.

When you say ads don't make much money, are you talking about from business users? 2Q 2016 $19 billion of Alphabet's $21 billion in revenue came from ads, so that seems like a strange statement.

The total advertising figure is irrelevant, most of their revenue comes from Search advertising where users are proactively in the context of seeking specific information at the point where relevant ads are most lucrative.

The only revenue being sacrificed is being able to deliver less contextual ads in gmail, they still know a lot about you so they'll still be targeted ads so their sacrificing marginal contextual targeting vs peace of mind in a large corporate market which are hesitant to use Google's G-Suite products because of their concerns that their emails are being scanned.

Google is smart, if they're doing this it's because they've calculated the increase potential in G-Suite revenue is more than the marginal loss in less contextually specific ads in gmail. Other factors that play a role in the decision is better branding in that Google is no longer spying in your private conversations to sell you targeted ads and the mitigation of potential lawsuits.

The title of this page:

   	Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

If they want me to use gmail for corporate email they better invest some effort in some UI & usability redesign.

Or maybe they could improve IMAP availability until it is only a few orders of magnitude worse than my local ISP (or the previous one, or all the IT departments I've dealt with this millennium...)

Huh? I use GMail via IMAP and I can't think of any time I've had problems. Am I just not noticing them?

They did.

Your mileage might vary but for me inbox is by far the most productive way to handle my e-mail.

and memory consumption. I'm always amazed that gmail.com uses so much memory if you leave it open for a few days.

Google has never shown any Sponsored Gmail ads to Google Apps users (the corporate users you're talking about). There is no Promotions tab, which is where these advertisements are inserted for personal GMail users.

> so walking away from an ads business that may possibly (but I doubt it) be earning hundreds of millions

They are making billions from ads, just look their annual report.

Sorry if this is obvious but I went to focus on revenue per user per year.

In other words, how much is it worth to fight the perception that gmail is somehow less secure than office 365 because ads (others have pointed out Google apps for business users don't see ads in their work gmail).

I somehow doubt that gmail ads are worth even remotely close to $120 (12 months * $10 per month) per user per year.

In other news: How much is a user worth per year to Google? Assuming not all users are the same, is there a way to predict his much revenue a user can bring for Google?

The competitor for Office 365 is GSuite, not Gmail. People that were previously shown ads based on email content are not going to start paying for Gmail.