I'm not sure how much it actually helped.
Customer support is really poor for a big chunk of those companies (I'm thinking Google, Facebook, not Apple or Amazon).
People also got the concept of emails quite easily way before gmail existed or hotmail was popular. I don't think having a lot of providers was much of an issue. A lot of people still use providers which are not as big as google or hotmail, at least where I live.
So I wonder if centralization was really something that helped people that much or it was more of a business strategy that was efficient for quick growth and that is the reason we are in this situation.
People also got the concept of emails quite easily way before gmail existed or hotmail was popular. I don't think having a lot of providers was much of an issue. A lot of people still use providers which are not as big as google or hotmail, at least where I live.
So I wonder if centralization was really something that helped people that much or it was more of a business strategy that was efficient for quick growth and that is the reason we are in this situation.