Look, popups are great for marketing, but this penalization isn't bad from a marketing and UX standpoint.

Popups, while effective, are being overused, which means they will become less and less effective.

On top of that, too many are poorly created and don't work on mobile, making it difficult to impossible to close out. This is unfortunate.

I've long held that we need a less intrusive "popup" that nudges instead of disrupts users. Basically a Hello Bar style that while catching my attention is something I can easily ignore.

She didn't hold him back. She helped him draw nearer to his bigger goal of going to grad school by being creative. Sure, a bigger raise would have also achieved the same goal, but as the author pointed out, she empathized with her employee and found creative ways to show that she actually cared and wanted to make the situation best for both of them, not just her.

The full use of the screen is quite nice when there is less is happening, such as the About page. And while the Dashboard/news page is clean, it could be rather overwhelming to look at and visually cluttered with poor pictures.

The one area I think he did fantastic in is of the displaying of individual pictures, events, finding friends, and company pages.

$50 "feels" like a lot because it's been given away free all this time. But our industry has spoiled us. We can hop from one free product to the next free product, but really we just need to determine if that one product is valuable enough to justify paying for it.

In the case of email, it's obviously valuable. While there are other options out there, ultimately you have to determine the cost of researching, testing, setting up, and switching over you and your employees. All this time is spent away from your money making activities.

Have you considered using aliases in GApps? Different than the catch all, but allows you to setup specific email addresses. I use them for accounts, newsletters, etc and then create filters and labels in my one apps email.