I agree that Google is becoming a lot more intrusive towards her end users and the incentive behind it is probably profit. But at lease for software developers,

I agree that Google is becoming a lot more intrusive towards her end users and the incentive behind it is probably profit. But at lease for software developers, from my experience, we as a group benefit from Google MORE than 5 years ago. Chrome AngularJS Go Selenium Webdriver dart Even Google Hangout with screen share helped our distributed team a lot. 5 years ago, what did Google offer? GWT? And, of course, the search engine, we developers probably use it more than many other groups users. I hardly heard anyone use alternative search engine for day-to-day software development related search. All these are of zero cost to us.