Oh sure. However, it also puts a lot of load / strain on servers that Google doesn't want to run (SMTP, IMAP, etc). The way the post is written makes it sound like Google has figured out how to tame some natural force to allow us to have big e-mail attachments, while all along the limit was set by Google itself. I really don't think that Google cares about Outlook users (why should they).
Somewhat unrelated, I think that Google is beginning to try and pressure people to stop using SMTP and IMAP. I've long used Mail.app, mutt, or Thunderbird to use mail hosted by Google, almost entirely because the GMail client doesn't support any kind of message encryption or authentication. Recently, I have been receiving a lot of "quota exceeded" messages during routine interactions with the IMAP servers. I suspect that Google is in the process of gradually lowering the allowed quotas for IMAP usage in an attempt to get people to use the web UI, Android, or cros ...
> I really don't think that Google cares about Outlook users (why should they).
Because they want their users to be able to communicate with Outlook users?
You are talking nonsense, they obviously need to play nice with other email hostings/clients; and with this new way of sending files it let their users know that they are two different ways of sending data; that is not really an email attachment but a link to your file in the cloud; a distinction that many times matter.
And they can't give the amount space they give in Drive to every gmail account; why would they do that? Better to be a different service that only the people interested in that kind of big cloud storage will take.
Somewhat unrelated, I think that Google is beginning to try and pressure people to stop using SMTP and IMAP. I've long used Mail.app, mutt, or Thunderbird to use mail hosted by Google, almost entirely because the GMail client doesn't support any kind of message encryption or authentication. Recently, I have been receiving a lot of "quota exceeded" messages during routine interactions with the IMAP servers. I suspect that Google is in the process of gradually lowering the allowed quotas for IMAP usage in an attempt to get people to use the web UI, Android, or cros ...