I don't think I buy this idea, and I don't think most honest developers would either. People want to know when their users aren't happy with their service, and they especially want to know if they're feeling alienated.

I think this is always a confusion point. Prior to the internet "user" and "customer" were pretty much synonymous. Now they can be entirely different. Users get confused when they miss this critical distinction.

No, everything is not new on the internet. Historically, this has always been the Media business model (newspaper, radio, TV, magazines, etc). Editors have balanced users and customers for a 100+ years.

Yes I agree. Good point.

That is true for most cases, but when shareholders and business come into the picture, the honest developers don't get a look in. It's shut up or don't get paid.

If Google lost 25% of its free userbase and converted only 10% of that 25% into Google Apps customers, and left the other 75% with advertising clicks it's a win situation for the business and shareholders.

Google is not immune to capitalism or business mantra unfortunately.

For reference, as an idealist and a bit of a Marxist, I'm not a fan of this but it's the way it is at the moment.

I'm letting them occupy a piece of my screen real estate and grab a share of my personal attention every day. I consider that a form of payment.

Now they're coming up with this massive price hike, putting us in a position to choose between accepting a higher price and spending a lot of time moving our data elsewhere. Many people don't even know how to move existing email to a different provider.

So this is definitely something we can legitimately complain about.

Your screen is only payment if they can put something they want there.

They always could put what they wanted on parts of the screen. Now they want wastly bigger or more expensive parts of tjat screen.

So if something doesn't cost you money, you have no business complaining about something you don't like? Weird logic. If someone offers something under any terms, it seems ok to me to say what I think of it. Your position seems to be that if it's free, it's illegitimate to comment on it.

The point is you get what you give. If you want a "better" service, it's going to cost you. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

There is a difference between a service monetized by Ads, and a service which tries to trick you into clicking on Ads.

Agreed. I think it's a little naive to think that a free service doesn't have to make money.

But! Without users Google won't have a business at all. So they should be careful with disruptive advertisement.