This has way too many upvotes. There are _lots_ of people who pay Google money for isolated, corporate installations of Gmail and the rest of the Google Apps suite.
And whether Gmail is paid for as an explicit line-item or not isn't what matters here; most of the money that funds Gmail comes from AdWords and Google's behavior with Gmail impresses upon AdWords customers. It's all done with Google's name and image and it all reflects back on Google collectively. It's perfectly fine to feel sad when a vendor does something you don't like with a "bonus product", even if you weren't billed specifically for your usage of that product.
This is a fair point. But surely you'll agree that the free and $10-per-month users vastly outnumber the corporate and Google Apps users. And I'd bet that the OP isn't one of those corporate customers (he's now edited his post to clarify).
In any case, we aren't really arguing about anything relevant to the discussion at hand.
I happen to think that the original comment was rather trollish given that he can still export his girlfriend's contact information from gmail. He just needs to click two more times now. I think the upvotes my comment got are reflective of a similar feeling about the whole thread from other HNers.
This has way too many upvotes. There are _lots_ of people who pay Google money for isolated, corporate installations of Gmail and the rest of the Google Apps suite.
And whether Gmail is paid for as an explicit line-item or not isn't what matters here; most of the money that funds Gmail comes from AdWords and Google's behavior with Gmail impresses upon AdWords customers. It's all done with Google's name and image and it all reflects back on Google collectively. It's perfectly fine to feel sad when a vendor does something you don't like with a "bonus product", even if you weren't billed specifically for your usage of that product.
This is a fair point. But surely you'll agree that the free and $10-per-month users vastly outnumber the corporate and Google Apps users. And I'd bet that the OP isn't one of those corporate customers (he's now edited his post to clarify).
In any case, we aren't really arguing about anything relevant to the discussion at hand.
I happen to think that the original comment was rather trollish given that he can still export his girlfriend's contact information from gmail. He just needs to click two more times now. I think the upvotes my comment got are reflective of a similar feeling about the whole thread from other HNers.