I would suggest that Gmail has little to gain by silencing Yahoo Mail or Outlook.com (that many have heard of anyways), but has a lot of reason to silence companies which are pointing out the privacy issues with using Gmail.
Ok sure, let's play "guess the name of the competitor that
tptacek is referring to" because he wants to be as vague as possible so as to not be rebutted
Which brings us to ocdtrekkie's point. FastMail a great niche product, but as paid product and one that doesn't sell itself on the privacy improvements over something like gmail, Google has absolutely nothing to worry about.
ProtonMail on the other hand, while not at the moment a threat to gmail does do a lot of brand damage to it, as it highlights the privacy problems people have with it.
