41–50 of 324 posts
You have to be biting your tongue awfully hard to shoot off "Google is, in other words, the new AOL." He admits all of the services are not complete alternatives, save for maybe RSS readers. In other words, either 99% of users can't manage to use these non-alternatives for reasons like calendar and contacts not syncing, or they already don't use the product like RSS, or they definitely won't be able to run their own…
"Unfortunately, there are no good alternatives to some Google properties. Maps...." For maps, depending on your uses, bing mapquest's map and geocoding APIs can be replacements, and sometimes cheaper.
You have to be biting your tongue awfully hard to shoot off "Google is, in other words, the new AOL." He admits all of the services are not complete alternatives, save for maybe RSS readers. In other words, either 99% of users can't manage to use these non-alternatives for reasons like calendar and contacts not syncing, or they already don't use the product like RSS, or they definitely won't be able to run their own…
No one has enough interest to simply leave a pretty compelling ecosystem, so you have to couch it in a way to makes it sound like an ethical imperative. You know, for blog views.
I almost wish we could pin a story like this just to cut some of those comments.
There are days when there will be multiple stories on the front page at the same time with comments asking, "what are the alternatives to gmail?" with the inevitable, "well, fastmail is a good choice" and then someone will bring up running your own server, and then someone else will respond about spam and blacklisting and downtime, and someone else will say something about they've been doing it for 5 years and it's not that hard, etc etc etc
Are there any good alternatives to Google Calendar? If not, seems like there may be a gap in the market for a next generation calendar service, as the core of Google Calendar has been the same for a while, I'm sure there must be some innovation available there.
I've been using GMail since its inception, so I figured I'd try the authors first suggestion, FastMail to see how the competition was fairing. The article mentions that FastMail operates both "free and paid tiers of service", so I figured I'd make a free account and poke around. But I've clicked and searched for five minutes now and found nothing except paid plans with a free trial. Am I missing something? Also, the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The $40/year account gives you 10gb of storage. It's comparable with Google Apps, and really $40/year is a totally fair price for something as important as email.
"and really $40/year is a totally fair price for something as important as email." It isn't about importance, it is about a comparison with its competitors. Drinking water is pretty important, but why pay for $5 worth of bottled water a day when I can pay 5¢ a day for water straight from the tap?
I'm not a crazy person who hates ads in gmail (see http://www.maxmasnick.com/2012/02/12/gmail_paranoia/), but I do believe in paying for things so that the incentives for a company align with what's best for me as a user.
https://www.fastmail.fm/help/login_yubikey.html
It appears to depend on a physical key that I'll have to carry around with me. Gmail's MFA relies on an app on my iPhone which is far more convenient and they have a backup way of getting into the account with a hand-typed key that is very long.
Why is good web-based email MFA so hard to implement and why has Google been the only one to perfect it?
Zoho provides good email, calendar, and many of additional apps for business such as CRM, invoices, etc. My teammates chose Zoho for a company-wide 500-person setup with email, calendar, wiki, project, etc. and are very pleased with it.