Jim S. said:

How can we impress this upon the people running it?

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As the subject of your attempt to impress is Google, there's precious little hope. It is kind of like the Surface people wanting something as simple as POP3 e-mail access or the Apple people wanting access other than through iTunes.

What you can do is research using Google's search engine to find out more about the package you're contemplating. It is much easier to start with someone else's review and build on it.

I do get what you are saying, and the best way it to read the reviews first.

harshness said:

As the subject of your attempt to impress is Google, there's precious little hope. It is kind of like the Surface people wanting something as simple as POP3 e-mail access or the Apple people wanting access other than through iTunes.

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As someone who works with large scale residential e-mail delivery systems I can tell you that POP3 is dieing away. While it ain't dead yet, the day is coming. When I started (late 2009) we had 6 POP and 6 IMAP servers. We managed to fill up the capacity of those 6 imap servers with no advertised capability, just an obscure link on our help page. By the end of 2010, we were up to 10 IMAP servers. At last count, it was 16. Meanwhile traffic via POP3 has declined by a small amount. With more people hitting the same account with multiple devices the only way to keep a consistent view is via IMAP.

On our new platform, we'll have 6 POP and 18 IMAP on dramatically more powerful hardware.

I'm not an MS fan by a long stretch, but in the case where someone is using a Surface tablet, they are probably going to need IMAP for their computer/smartphone/tablet to access the same account and keep a consistent view of their messages across the devices.

This is like a wild tangent to the OP, sorry if this goes too far off the beaten path.