Saying this from firsthand experience as a customer of Google's B2B offerings, Google earned its bad reputation on the enterprise side.
Saying this after a good number of years as a PM: when you spend 40-50 hours a week thinking about your product, it's really easy to get lost in the weeds and forget that your users see your product from a totally different perspective than you do. I see this all the time because it's very, very difficult to avoid this problem.
My partner's auncle was also an ex government official from the previous government.
He was in charge of the country's office for regulation work in rural areas.
Up to that point, he was a complete believer that the government he was part of, was there to really change things and put the country in the right track.
When the news about that other guy's 8 mill broke out, he was completelly and uterly devastated.
I think the same can be applied to a lot of the people that works in Google regarding the way they perceive the company.
I just recently read in the news that there has been some retaliation exherted on googlers because of organizing some walkouts.
To think that your company just does good because you try to do good, and not take a look at what is really going around in the world related to what the company you work for is "a little" naive.
Also, I think that right now companies like Google and FB should be treated and reasoned about like states. To think that they will not abuse their power in one way or the other - just like countries do - is also "a little" naive.
That companies this big ought to be reasoned about just like Nation States is a very interesting idea.
But my point was more directed towrds understanding how companies this big are starting to behave.
I do think antitrust is a way to look at it, but the anti trust laws in the US I think are difficult to point towards Google for instance (Probably the same about European laws)
> we aught to have a discussion about whether nation-state size companies are really a desirable feature
I think it goes a way longer than that. Obviously private companies are subjected to a lot less scrutiny than states, but states do miss behave and do not run into the risk of eternal intervention, unless they really fuck up, and even then.
> I have this 8 million from the church, but I need to get it out of the country in order to spend it ...
Disclosure: I've been self-hosting for 5 years.
Then I looked at what was in my Spam folder. I haven't looked into it for a long time before, because, well, Google has trained me that their spam filtering "just works".
I now try to check it at least once a week. The amount of false positives was staggering, and some of it was important.
The worst thing about this blocking is that you often times don't get to see what's wrong. So you're running around in circles, trying to use various mx tools on the internet to find the problem.
This is not just gmail issue. Though with many smaller providers you'll at least get something like "your blocked by XYZ blacklist".
I would much rather get this than silent discard. At least when I've seen things in the logs in the past (yes, I do read my server logs), I have been able to follow up and fix them. I get the sense that Google is even going beyond using 550 and discarding email silently. I just did a grep through my logs to see if this message came up and found it nowhere, yet I have users on my mailing lists claiming they don't get emails and they've checked their spam folders. They're on GMail.
This is so deeply disingenuous and at odds with so many peoples experience it’s absurd. Or satire?