Technology

You'd hate any legitimate alternative that got popular

Dude, so edgy calling proton slop. I think for what they're doing, its great to make a full suite of apps to help users ditch Google! So many people won't jump the Google, Microsoft, or Apple ship until there are direct enough replacements to all the apps they used. Plus, I feel you're just jumping on the 'hate proton' bandwagon from other posts* without providing any real reasoning... Go back to reddit with that sheep brain mentality.

Also, they (Proton) understand there are those who refuse to pay no matter how good services might be, so their targeting businesses also make sense! They have grown enough they can handle scaling for business customers, and they're paying customers to help keep personal tier stuff free for this who keep it at that. There's probably not many US companies trying to ditch US tech, but there are certainly a shit ton of EU companies ditching* US tech to either use LibreOffice or others, so it's a perfect position to offer Docs and Sheets replacements too (which they have).

I don't know if they're taking old Google apps and just stripping Google devices out of them or coding from some other FOSS fork, but they're using a lot of the same naming conventions (maybe to keep simple).

Personally, Proton IS who I push friends and family to because of the privacy focus, it's a sort of 1-stop shop replacement for everything so it's far easier to switch. Think about it... 1 account to change to vs many, with support if trouble, and is available in multiple languages, countries, platforms, etc. Why would you not share them with family? Not everybody is obsessed with privacy in the first place, so many are still blind to the data harvesting or just don't care enough. Proton helps make it more convincing to switch and protect those people. I think it make sense.