> Would the world be better off without free (to users) GMaps and free GMail?
Yes, because "free" collapses that entire market and makes it hard to ever get anything else, all while granting a massive amount of power to a company that is happy to break the ecosystem. GMail 1. makes it hard for any new email companies to get off the ground by making it hard to get income, while 2. making it hard for anyone (not an established major player) to successfully send email without it getting blackholed. That is, I blame GMail for the fact that I can't spin up my own mail server and send email and have people actually get it.
Perhaps put better: GMail and Google Maps did improve on what was then available, but in a way that also makes them dead ends for the entire industry, unable to improve beyond a certain point because of how they work while at the same time preventing anyone else from being able to make something better.
Yes, because "free" collapses that entire market and makes it hard to ever get anything else, all while granting a massive amount of power to a company that is happy to break the ecosystem. GMail 1. makes it hard for any new email companies to get off the ground by making it hard to get income, while 2. making it hard for anyone (not an established major player) to successfully send email without it getting blackholed. That is, I blame GMail for the fact that I can't spin up my own mail server and send email and have people actually get it.
Perhaps put better: GMail and Google Maps did improve on what was then available, but in a way that also makes them dead ends for the entire industry, unable to improve beyond a certain point because of how they work while at the same time preventing anyone else from being able to make something better.