I don’t have a dog in the fight, I don’t choose Gmail or Outlook. But if I were to play devil’s advocate, I think I would argue Outlook is better on the grounds that Microsoft is not an advertising company. As a company, they don’t depend on distributing free software to folks who are willing to, or maybe ignorant they are trading their personal privacy in exchange.

No doubt Microsoft is trying to monetize user data at this point as well, but their empire isn’t built on top of it. The parent comment said they use ProtonMail for personal, So I suspect they only reason they don’t choose that for business also is the weight the Microsoft name still holds.

Many of us got sucked into the Google vortex a while back on the basis they gave us many of the best software options, in many categories. But at this point, there is nothing Google does that you can’t find an alternative of equal or better quality. So if one day a person realizes Google values don’t align with their own, slowly phasing out all Google services can only have a net positive.

Microsoft is approaching that strategy with Windows - they're very nearly giving away Windows 10 at this point, and it ships a lot of data back to MS, plus you're essentially the beta tester for software updates for their enterprise customers.

Microsoft business model is trying to insert themselves as a middleman between you and device in as many ways as possible and collect toll fees. I’m not a philosopher but not sure that’s ethically superior to showing ads (also they do show you ads)

I don’t disagree, I think you’re right. I can just identify with folks trying to slowly de-google their lives, I’ve been on a similar mission around a year. The Microsoft name does still carry a lot of weight in the business world, so I suspect that’s the only reason the parent is still partially using them. If it were me I’d go ahead and go full protonmail (or others), but I get the reluctance.

> trying to insert themselves as a middleman between you and device in as many ways as possible and collect toll fees

So... they're a software company? Specifically an OS vendor?

Seriously, how does your description imply anything unethical?

You can't even buy a device today that forces you to use MS. You can always install something else or hack your Windows installation however you want.

Unethical part is having oems ship all their devices with proprietary apis and software that is black box.

> You can't even buy a device today that forces you to use MS

That’s only because they lost that battle.

> Unethical part is having oems ship all their devices with proprietary apis and software that is black box.

This is nonsense. Microsoft doesn't ship most hardware running Windows, and there was never a time any of it was locked to Windows.

I installed Linux on dozens of Windows machines starting in the 90s.

By your logic, all software is unethical if it's closed-source. Apple, Samsung, and every phone manufacturer actually do put effort into locking down their hardware, so you must think they're all far more evil than MS.

>I think I would argue Outlook is better on the grounds that Microsoft is not an advertising company.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesnt the free outlook.com (formerly hotmail) still have ads for everybody who doesnt pay? When I log in, I have a banner on the right.

But to your point, maybe the ad is there to annoy people into paying, and less as a source of revenue.

So what you're saying is that tech savvy people just don't like Google? Maybe it's because of the slow drop in quality of their search engine, their tendency to cancel projects that people relied on, and their questionable privacy practices? At least, that's why I don't like them. And that's not even mentioning the pit of conspiracy theory peddling, pedophile supporting nastiness that is Youtube.

> Google pulls in more functionality into core services. Hn crowd: monopoly! Google pulls out rarely used features. Hn crowd: am I supposed use different app now?!?

As you surely know the HN crowd isn't a monolithic thing, it is made of a lot of people covering the entire spectrum of existing opinions. Different groups are complaining for different reasons, so that's really to be expected...

Not really.. it just becomes harder in some cases. For example Google Reader, that went no where and they just killed it. They really could have transformed mailing lists into rss feeds.

Also, google trips. That was great to plan trips about. (Although their map collections is terrible)

It's a basic You Moved My Cheese situation. Change can be good, but pointless change made for no user-visible reason is not.

> Also how is outlook any better?

Google: our business is ads, and you’re the product. Put more of your data into Gmail so that we can show you more ads and do a million other things that benefit us.

Microsoft: our business is software and services and hardware and a bunch of other stuff you can pay us money for. E-mail service is the product, and you’re the customer.

Literally Microsoft:

"""Microsoft uses the data we collect to provide you with rich, interactive experiences. In particular, we use data to: [etc and so forth]; Advertise and market to you, which includes sending promotional communications, targeting advertising, and presenting you with relevant offers."""

Then why are there ads in my Windows 10 OS? Why the aggressive data sponging behavior?

Microsoft is a lot better than Google, but I still feel like I am their product when I use their OS.

It's much more insidious at the operating system level. It's easier to change email providers than your entire operating system. I'm shocked there isn't a louder outcry over Microsoft's intrusions this way into Windows.

That's the old Microsoft. As of a few years ago, it has started to shift in the direction of Google too.

If Microsoft doesn’t show you ads why is “Upgrade to ad-free Premium” a thing? You can turn off ads by buying g suite (albeit its more expensive) or just use adblock of some kind.