Yes, having gmail account was wild in early 2000s. Hotmail or yahoo were the only options.

2000s was also the time when the motto of google was “don’t be evil” and people believed them. Most importantly Google employees believed the company believed it.

This was the point I began my Google-exit.

What I feel is more remarkable than how long ago this all began, is how stable the choices I moved to have been. Fastmail has been amazing, Feedbin is still very solid, DuckDuckGo while not perfect is good enough while Google search results continue to get worse.

Other than occasionally needing to use GSuite when others share documents through it, I pretty rarely use anything by Google intentionally anymore.