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EAS is proprietary, from an end-user point of view it results in lock-in to a single supplier, and introduces requirement for the consumer to have to pay royalties. To retain such a standard as the only means of access is to reduce consumer functionality. To get rid of such a lock-in to a proprietary pay-per-access "standard" is by far the best thing to happen, from a consumer perspective.

I put the word "standard" in italics here, in relation to EAS, because a true standard is mean to enable inter-operability of different products. See here for a definition:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_standard
"A software standard is a standard, protocol, or other common format of a document, file, or data transfer accepted and used by one or more software developers while working on one or more than one computer programs. Software standards enable interoperability between different programs created by different developers."

EAS constrains consumers to MS products only. If anything, it is an anti-standard.

This is a self-evident truth. How could you have possibly got it so backwards?

I don't really think it is the case. People use EAS because it is the best solution. The people I know that interact with it on a daily basis swear by it.

I find it backwards to complain about something, but offer up no alternative which replicates its functionality. There is no equivalent to EAS. It is the best at what it does.

That is all I am saying.

You have it backwards. Microsoft licenses their standard for implementation by third parties. Are you really saying that Google uses Exchange as the back end for GMail (Or Yahoo, etc.)?

EAS clearly meets your standard definition as it is widely supported by most mobile operating systems as well as major service providers. In reality, CalDAV and CardDAV are not nearly as widely adopted. As I mentioned last time this came up Google themselves do not support it in Android yet.

Now please tell me how is the consumer impacted negatively here? (First look up the definition of consumer, vs customer)

Did the deprecation of EAS on free Google services make it impossible to use Outlook.com or other services that provide the same functionality?

I was wondering when you'd show up. No, not impossible, just inconvenient.

Everything can be worked around, but jut telling people to switch to Outlook.com is the wrong answer.

Google either needed to relent or Microsoft needed to implement DAV (which it looks like they're doing). Telling people to migrate all of their data over somewhere else over a political decision is stupid.