Recently Andy Yen dumped a whole boatload of suggestions about the future of Proton. Article is machine-translated so some discrepancies may exist.
Regarding Chromium:
But suddenly, it’s mainly a problem of open web standards, don’t you think? This is the discussion we always have with Sir Tim, the W3C and others. To some extent, this battle is long lost, to be completely honest…Yes, I think this battle is already lost.
Everyone assumed we were building a browser because a job posting came up, but that’s not necessarily the case. We do a lot of web-related things at Proton, and there are plenty of reasons why I might want to hire someone who is very fluent in browsers. That doesn’t mean we’re building one.…I don’t say anything at all, because I don’t know what I will build in the future.
I am often asked the question of instant messaging: “Create a chat”, etc. Do I think we will ever do it? We’ll end up doing everything, it’s just a question of schedule and timing…You also have to understand the logic: with Proton Workspace, we want to compete with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace .
Interesting confirmation of what we all probably already suspected.
Let’s turn our attention back to “what about Proton’s business model is evil”, where I told you two evil things Proton did that apparently aligned with its business model: Destroying two competitors.
The only apparent defense you have for these two evils is to say a different thing is not apparently evil (vendor lock-in?) but a lack of evil does not absolve evil . I’d rather focus on that than being dragged down into a pedantic debate about which types of Proton emails really do lock users in (as anyone who has ever signed up for a website with an email address will tell you, it does).
I’m trying to understand your thinking. I don’t see the evil in buying a company to learn what they know. Buying standard notes resulted in proton docs, but standard notes is still there. Simplelogin is still there. I don’t see how they are “destroyed”.