read Crossing The Chasm. You don't get the late adopters unless you get the early adopters first. Google may think they've got to a point where they can just cram stuff down people's throats, but if so, it's the beginning of the end for them, like it was for Microsoft.
I am curious on what basis you say that Microsoft thinking that it could cram stuff down people's throats was the beginning of the end.
It seems to me that Microsoft behaved that way for over a decade. It resulted in some pissed off geeks, and no real problems until the Europeans fined Microsoft enough to scare the company. (A fear they never recovered from.)
I don't know that there's any one authoritative answer, but they fended off the initial Internet threat by cramming IE down everyone's throat. They did that in a number of cases, were fast followers and put people out of business by integrating/bundling. I think the attitude was they could do it again if they had to, thought they could do the same in phones and tablets, didn't listen to their customers, didn't update IE and XP for years.
Partly Microsoft got lazy and didn't execute the products customers wanted, maybe the senior people were wrong generation to realize they had the wrong products and Google and Apple were leapfrogging them, maybe all the legacy cruft in their ecosystem slowed them down, maybe the world changed so they didn't have the same market power. I don't know that fines ever really scared them into changing behavior. They flushed more money down the drain in online services than anyone ever threatened to fine them.
Even more than most, Google's business depends on trust. Once people feel they're going to get screwed over after investing time and trusting Google with their information and data exhaust, they'll go to DuckDuckGo, Apple, Facebook (ha), whatever. Google has nothing like the moat Microsoft had. On the Internet, the switch to the competition is a click away.
The question is, how many of those people would have become Gmail users if not for Gmail's early success with the technical people. I do not know the answer to that (or even if it is an accurate premise), but one theory would be that in order to get non-technical users, you must first get the technical users, who will give your product good word of mouth and help it spread.
I would generally agree with you, but there are several popular services that I learned of from non-technical people. Things like tumbler, pinterest, snapchat come to mind. Lots of artsy social stuff out there that I have never used, but are used by non-technical people.
