With Gmail, I just forward my mail to my Outlook.com account, and I switched my email address on as many sites as I could to use my Outlook.com email address. Works just fine.
Office Online with OneDrive is a fantastic product. Sure it costs money, but if you're not paying for a product, you're not "locked in". Download your docs in Office format and save them to OneDrive, done.
I actually switched to Bing Maps a long time prior to this because Google Maps has such poor performance on every computer I use it on. Google Maps has the far superior place search, but Bing Maps works better as an actual map in my experience.
The only Google service I use regularly is Google Translate, because there really is no comparison.
There is one, since yesterday. Try https://www.deepl.com/translator
FWIW, YouTube is actually the only Google product I allow to store my history and recommend me stuff, because it's the only place I find it actually helpful or valuable, and the privacy risk of that data is of low value to me.
Not trying to encourage anyone one way or the other, but a good FYI to keep in mind.
Just say yes to diversity! ;-)
I started with an attempt to leave Google products for political/moral reasons and ended up finding superior products on the way.
The hardest part about moving away from Google around 4 years ago was migrating all my account email address to new providers.
That basically took me an afternoon. No big deal.
1. They have three tabs for emails, so to check if I have any new emails, I literally have to click through 3 different tabs.
2. When I have long email threads, new emails get lost under the clutter instead of showing up at the top of my inbox like a rational human being would expect.
3. When I actually click to open an email thread; 99% of the stuff is collapsed and I keep having to expand it out which is really annoying.
With a lot of modern web-based email clients, I always feel like the company is trying to hide my own emails from me which is creepy - That's why I like the simplest layout possible. New emails should always appear at the top and highlighted as unread.
When Marissa Mayer came to Yahoo, she changed the Yahoo email web client so that it would group emails in the Google way. I lost faith in humanity that day. I almost quit the service but thankfully at least they had a setting which allowed me to revert back to the correct way.
Maybe Gmail has a setting to display emails correctly (like Yahoo) but I haven't heard about it.
There is. I ended up setting up my Gmail where unread and read emails are in separate accordion-like sections. The 3 tabs thing makes for horrible UX
3. This IMO is good design and you can expand all (although I almost never need to do so myself).
In tech right now, if you fire any people, all the other good people will leave too.
Then you have a crowd of mediocre engineers and have no hope of competing in the future.
“Google is very aggressive in throwing its money around Washington and Brussels, and then pulling the strings,” Mr. Lynn said. “People are so afraid of Google now.”
Honestly, the only thing shocking about any of this is that people thought Google was "special". The reality is, when its revenues are threatened, it's going to reach like any other corporation, which it should.
Google has its tentacles into almost everything, and you should be concerned/cautious about lock in, abuse and market competition challenges that go with it.
I personally find it a challenge every day to avoid using Google Services. I use Bing instead of Google, but I'm locked into Gmail (which is a great product), Google Drive (A great product), Google Maps (a great product), etc.