> Someday, maybe today, we have to ask ourselves if email (Gmail) is a public utility. That's an interesting way of looking at it and you're right, Google's in

> Someday, maybe today, we have to ask ourselves if email (Gmail) is a public utility. That's an interesting way of looking at it and you're right, Google's initial approach to marketing the product did frame it in that way. I think it's going to become increasingly important for users to be able to pull their data out of a system and migrate it to another. Open APIs for pulling data out would be a great start and there are already nascent efforts to make migration of data from one cloud hosted service to another possible. For example Todoport here converts tasks between all the major task list managers like Asana, Wunderlist, Trello, etc. https://todoport.com/index.html https://todoport.com/index.html In the above case of task managers I recently tried to switch from Things by Cultured Cloud to another service. The migration process was practically non-existent and I eventually ended up having to write a fairly large AppleScript to get my data out of Things into a CSV and then a Python script to push it up to my new Task List provider. It was a messy few days of scripting to say the least! Office365 to Google Apps or Dropbox to OneDrive in my opinion should be a one click migration and companies need to stop holding user's data to ransom to keep them on their services. I personally think pressure to make these changes will have to come from outside the industry since it's clear that all the major players are basically trying to duplicate each other's features in an effort to ensure their users stay within their own platforms.