Gmail is an atrocity of a once great service, possibly the easiest component of Google to disrupt (all IMO of course)
I am on a 6 Mbps connection and I regularly have to kill my Gmail window or else it hogs the bandwidth, memory leaks until it crashes my browser (Firefox), or slows the entire browser to a crawl for any other window. I see no such issues with facebook, twitter, or any other web site I visit regularly. Then there's all the weird javascript idiosyncracies when one wants to reply to a message and the compose window won't appear unless I open a new tab. Sigh...
And don't even get me started on the abomination that Chrome has become, possibly IMO, because so much of its original team has long since left Google (ex-googler myself who knew many of them).
I agree -- gmail has become crappy, and their recent changes on mobile suck. eg shrinking inbox view from 8 messages to 5.5 on my nexus 5 (fuck the jerk who decided to do that.)
That said, how can one compete with them? I just switched to fastmail which is very ok at best -- I have a list of bugs, and their web client is very half assed. But I don't know that I believe there are enough people who want a good gmail and who are willing to pay eg $40/year for it to make a business if you don't have search ads making money rain out of the sky to subsidize everything else...
It is subsidized -- the development costs were largely born (I think, but at minimum partially born) by the public ad supported version. It's perfectly possible that it would not be profitable to run it solely as an ad-free business, but once you've already built it the profit is largely incremental. Don't ignore their strategic reasons for building it either, ie cutting the legs out from under microsoft's most profitable product office: it's quite possible google apps is not particularly profitable and the value is largely strategic.
I am on a 6 Mbps connection and I regularly have to kill my Gmail window or else it hogs the bandwidth, memory leaks until it crashes my browser (Firefox), or slows the entire browser to a crawl for any other window. I see no such issues with facebook, twitter, or any other web site I visit regularly. Then there's all the weird javascript idiosyncracies when one wants to reply to a message and the compose window won't appear unless I open a new tab. Sigh...
And don't even get me started on the abomination that Chrome has become, possibly IMO, because so much of its original team has long since left Google (ex-googler myself who knew many of them).