No they don't. This man has given up his livelihood. Google could shut down their (free) e-mail service, probably without having to fire a single employee. Yes

No they don't. This man has given up his livelihood. Google could shut down their (free) e-mail service, probably without having to fire a single employee. Yes the amount of intelligence they could gather on each of their users would undoubtedly suffer, and so their ad revenue might eventually lose a bit of growth, but life (and business) would go on for Google.