Your information is a few years out of date, there is a new translation engine on the market that seems to be objectively better (deepl.com) as well as more GDPR-friendly ;)

The search engine I can't disagree with.

The email service... email is email to me, Google doesn't offer any features that Thunderbird doesn't already have && that I want. If you mean the search function inside of gmail, then yes, but that's kinda also just search. Or if you mean deliverability, that's not a function of skill but a function of being huge and if my mail server does something wrong then nobody is going to believe me if I say it's google's fault and google definitely isn't going to fix it. Or if you mean spam filtering, that's again because they just throw you out (into the spambox, but because google users rarely look there, that's out) and force you to use some (other) bigcorp for delivering just to them. The power that comes with being super huge.

The problem with “email is email” is that people can’t easily change email addresses, so once in gmail they can’t leave, no matter how egregiously google abuses the data.

We might be better off with an email address portability law similar to what exists for mobile phone numbers, but even without that GMail offers POP and IMAP access as well as forwarding to external addresses.

I mean they could've easily sprinkled in some AI to decide which specific unread items to prioritise, and turned the homepage into a social media feed with sharing and commenting, while presenting RSS feeds similarly to Facebook's pages.

It had all the potential to become the basis of Google+, but Google just prioritises building products from scratch instead of improving existing ones (hence 50 or so IM / video call apps).

That would've been a good way to go. It's a shame they haven't gotten social to catch in any of their many attempts (Buzz, Plus, YouTube, Reader, etc.) because I'd prefer anything from Google over Facebook.

I'm cautiously optimistic that Google is slowly recognizing the error prioritizing hot new projects over continuous maintenance and improvement of existing ones. Google Chat seems like it might finally be a proper successor to Google Talk after dozens of half-baked services: Hangouts, Voice, Allo, Duo, Messages, etc. etc. etc.

Sites will not let you crawl unless you are Google or maybe Microsoft. They might have, if it looked like you were likely going to become much better than Google and would be competitive. But you will never look like that because they will not let you crawl. Is this true? I don't know, but it is one story. And gets to why there's a more fundamental economic mechanism to Google's monopoly, over Amazon's or Microsoft's.

But Google got a whole bunch of way more niche products today. Just check the play store.

fastmail is better than gmail.

Is it really? Gmail is pretty good at spam blocking and searching through your email. I haven't found a better alternative, although I'm open to other options