On open source and standards Google has been a leader. Contributions: 1. VP8, VP9 and 90% of av1 2. WebRTC 3. Nacl/Pnacl that was killed by W3C for no techni

On open source and standards Google has been a leader. Contributions: 1. VP8, VP9 and 90% of av1 2. WebRTC 3. Nacl/Pnacl that was killed by W3C for no technical reason, in favor of an inferior wasm 4. SpyDy inspiring http2 5. V8 js runtime 6. Angular js 7. ProtoBuf and grpc 8. Android 9. Huge contributions to the looking kernel, and many many open source libraries, like boring ssl 10. Brotli compression and other related tech 11. Go language 12. Tensorflow 13. ... It's a bit sensationalist to label Google an "extinguisher". If anything, they're a huge enabler in software. Now, all the above doesn't make itself. A company pays competent software engineers to work on this full time. I'm in complete support of Google's attempts to monetise Gmail, one of their largest services. After all someone needs to pay for those engineers, and most of all, Google is a for profit enterprise You're free to transition to any of the other million standards compliant providers, there's no data lock-in. You can download your email via imap, another standard that was pushed by Google when the competition was only offering web-email