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The key point of the article is this: “Google is very aggressive in throwing its money around Washington and Brussels, and then pulling the strings,” Mr. Lynn
by redm 9y ago
The key point of the article is this:
“Google is very aggressive in throwing its money around Washington and Brussels, and then pulling the strings,” Mr. Lynn said. “People are so afraid of Google now.”
Honestly, the only thing shocking about any of this is that people thought Google was "special". The reality is, when its revenues are threatened, it's going to reach like any other corporation, which it should.
Google has its tentacles into almost everything, and you should be concerned/cautious about lock in, abuse and market competition challenges that go with it.
I personally find it a challenge every day to avoid using Google Services. I use Bing instead of Google, but I'm locked into Gmail (which is a great product), Google Drive (A great product), Google Maps (a great product), etc.
- freehunter 9y agoAre you actually locked into those services? I decided to switch away from Google when they mixed up my inbox with someone else's and started sending my email to someone who quickly used the mistake to issue password resets on many of my accounts, and it was easier than I thought. With Gmail, I just forward my mail to my Outlook.com account, and I switched my email address on as many sites as I could to use my Outlook.com email address. Works just fine. Office Online with OneDrive is a fantastic product. Sure it costs money, but if you're not paying for a product, you're not "locked in". Download your docs in Office format and save them to OneDrive, done. I actually switched to Bing Maps a long time prior to this because Google Maps has such poor performance on every computer I use it on. Google Maps has the far superior place search, but Bing Maps works better as an actual map in my experience. The only Google service I use regularly is Google Translate, because there really is no comparison.
- mhermher 9y agoAnd YouTube, where the competition is not even close as far as content. It's really the one irreplaceable Google product.
- ocdtrekkie 9y agoLike the Play Store/Android. In a space where content is king, monopolies win big. FWIW, YouTube is actually the only Google product I allow to store my history and recommend me stuff, because it's the only place I find it actually helpful or valuable, and the privacy risk of that data is of low value to me.
- visarga 9y ago> The only Google service I use regularly is Google Translate, because there really is no comparison. There is one, since yesterday. Try https://www.deepl.com/translator https://www.deepl.com/translator
- eridius 9y agoUnfortunately that appears to only support western European languages.
- brepl 9y agoIt only supports _some_ western European languages.
- kruczek 9y agoImpressive. I tried it on a couple comments in the thread as well as paragraphs from news sources, translating English<->Polish and back, and it indeed produces much more readable (I might even say: natural) translations, than Google Translate.
- nether 9y agoSwitch to protonmail. The only downside is spelling out the domain when giving it to people over the phone.
- ocdtrekkie 9y agoI've actually found FastMail wholly superior to Gmail, HERE Maps refreshingly good at working without a data connection, which is a lifesaver while traveling, and I use Sandstorm.io over Drive, which is capable of a lot more as well. I started with an attempt to leave Google products for political/moral reasons and ended up finding superior products on the way.
- ionised 9y agoThat has been my experience too. The hardest part about moving away from Google around 4 years ago was migrating all my account email address to new providers. That basically took me an afternoon. No big deal.
- abawany 9y agoSame (ish) here. I switched to Runbox and also use HERE Maps. Very happy so far.
- tycho01 9y agoNote, Here Maps doesn't seem Asia proof yet, just seems to use English everywhere.
- bagacrap 9y agoIn what way are you locked into maps? Are you using that phrase to mean you're unable to switch or just that you like the product too much to switch?
- tjr225 9y agoI have ditched google almost entirely. The only two google services I use are search (via duckduckgo bang encrypted searches) and maps. Honestly...OpenStreetMap and Apple Maps simply do not compare. It is very hard to not use Google Maps. I also use Waze but it is my understanding that the two are of the same. Even so, I prefer to use Google Maps.
- ben_jones 9y agoPeople like to talk about the great employee environment, open source contributions, and philanthropic work of Google, but what projects will get cut when Google finally has a bad quarter? Is Google at it's core actually different - or is it more of the same, merely enjoying a circumstantial utopia period for its first two decades?
- londons_explore 9y agoGoogle will sell off divisions before sacking staff I think. In tech right now, if you fire any people, all the other good people will leave too. Then you have a crowd of mediocre engineers and have no hope of competing in the future.
- seccess 9y agoIf you are considering no longer using Google or one of their products: they offer an easy way to export your (signed in) data for archival, or even wholesale delete your account and take all your data with you: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190 https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3024190 Not trying to encourage anyone one way or the other, but a good FYI to keep in mind.
- throwaway1232-4 9y agoI don't think Google is bad. But with my engineer hat on, I choose to diversify my risks. In particular, if Google chooses to disable my account, I don't want my email, my phone (and phone service), my ISP, my calendar, my documents and slides, my navigation, etc., all to instantly drop dead at the same time. Just say yes to diversity! ;-)
- jondubois 9y agoI like most Google products but I think that Gmail is the wost email client that was ever created. The default way in which it groups emails is terrible: 1. They have three tabs for emails, so to check if I have any new emails, I literally have to click through 3 different tabs. 2. When I have long email threads, new emails get lost under the clutter instead of showing up at the top of my inbox like a rational human being would expect. 3. When I actually click to open an email thread; 99% of the stuff is collapsed and I keep having to expand it out which is really annoying. With a lot of modern web-based email clients, I always feel like the company is trying to hide my own emails from me which is creepy - That's why I like the simplest layout possible. New emails should always appear at the top and highlighted as unread. When Marissa Mayer came to Yahoo, she changed the Yahoo email web client so that it would group emails in the Google way. I lost faith in humanity that day. I almost quit the service but thankfully at least they had a setting which allowed me to revert back to the correct way. Maybe Gmail has a setting to display emails correctly (like Yahoo) but I haven't heard about it.
- micael_dias 9y agoI don't like Gmail either. But inbox.google.com is awesome.
- rapind 9y ago1. Agreed it's a horrible design. Luckily you can turn tabs off and go back to a normal inbox. 3. This IMO is good design and you can expand all (although I almost never need to do so myself).
- yazan94 9y ago> Maybe Gmail has a setting to display emails correctly (like Yahoo) but I haven't heard about it. There is. I ended up setting up my Gmail where unread and read emails are in separate accordion-like sections. The 3 tabs thing makes for horrible UX
- tripzilch 9y agoYou can disable the tab thing in your first point. I did that almost as soon as it rolled out. No idea where the setting for that is though (I suppose somewhere in the gmail settings screen).