That depends on what you define as "health".
> Email itself, of course has a huge network effect, and that is because you can email anyone in the world, regardless of what email system they use
If that's the case, then why does Gmail system explicitly thwart this objective, as described by this very article?
> If we lose an open, healthy ecosystem with many providers, we'll destroy the base we stand on
And that's exactly what Gmail is doing when it does what is described in the article.
> we care deeply about having positive relationships with developers and all our users
You personally might, but your company does not. What your company cares about is advertising revenue. If your company really cared about users, it would figure out a way to let them pay directly for your company's services (not just Gmail but search, maps, etc.) so you could see directly from users how valuable those services were, instead of having any benefit to users be a side effect of trying to capture their eyeballs for advertisers.
