I think you've acknowledged that Google and Amazon provide the best services of their respective classes. Can we find a way to maintain that high standard without the crud that comes with it?
The web app is bloated and slow. The ads. The awkward design. Privacy issues. There's a bunch of benefits someone could offer. Fastmail tried but I still think it could be better and not based in Australia where privacy has been eroded.
The barrier to entry for doing categorization, spam detection, search, autosuggestions, and even complex JS frontends is significantly lower than it's ever been. You could even offload some of the above challenges to the client with prepackaged ML models. The spam filtering stuff could even be open sourced and community run like Adblockers. Abuse could still be handled server side.
I mean, I can assume you don't care for the change, but it's there. Streetview was launched in 2007.
However just recently they added an AR navigation to the mobile apps.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/08/google-maps-ar-navig...
My argument is every single monopoly eventually becomes 'bad' and makes progress stagnate and prices rise.
Just look at Google and Amazon. Up until I'd say late-ish 00s, nearly everyone loved Google and Amazon. I remember when Google search, GMail, Maps, street view, etc. first came out. I loved them, and I felt they were so much better than the competition. Same thing with Amazon - their selection was huge, great delivery and customer service.
I still use Google and Amazon for so much, but it's usually with reluctance and distaste. Check out Google search results these days. The ENTIRE first page about half way past the fold is ads, or AMP carousels, or shit I just want to get out of my way. But I still use them because with their heft and scale no one does long tail searches as comprehensively.