He kept getting told to stop working on it and he kept doing it anyway. Eventually resorting to back-channeling to Larry in order to get him to champion the project.

He tells the story in an episode of the podcast "The Social Radars."

Pretty good listen.

By G+ leadership - Vic Gundotra.

This is hardly reproductible. I guess that the standard place people go after gmail is fastmail.

But getting a free equivalent is hard (at least I do not know any). I could host my mail but this is hard work and monitoring.

Gmail, GDocs, and GAnalytics have been the hardest replace. I can't find a reasonable free alt. to those.

It is the one that works best for concurrent editing IMO (but it is markdown which can be a problem for some)