I wrote something about this a little while ago: http://michaelgr.com/2010/02/15/why-google-is-not-like-microsoft-or-facebook/ http://michaelgr.com/2010/02/15/

I wrote something about this a little while ago: http://michaelgr.com/2010/02/15/why-google-is-not-like-microsoft-or-facebook/ http://michaelgr.com/2010/02/15/why-google-is-not-like-micro... It's about how Google has different incentives than companies like Microsoft and Facebook; in short, they have incentives to make their customers happy because for most of their products there's very little friction that keeps users from switching, while others have incentives to create more lock in and bigger walls to keep people from switching. Making customers happy because kind of secondary after you've reached a certain mass with this business model.