6 ms·

There is no lock-in with Google, and that makes all the difference. Switching to a different provider of search, email, website statistics, ads, browser, etc,

by tjogin 17y ago

There is no lock-in with Google, and that makes all the difference. Switching to a different provider of search, email, website statistics, ads, browser, etc, is not only possible — it is effortless. Google haven't made alliances with other vendors to make it hard or even uncomfortable to use a competitor's product in either market. Quite the contrary, many of their services provide means of exporting my data, unlike many of their competitors. Google does not dominate either one of those markets due to having leveraged dominance on another market, forcing the end-user's choice. I do not have to use Gmail just because I use Google for searching, it is just as easy to use any other email provider instead. Same thing goes for ads, browser, etc. As long as Google's services continue to be free of lock-in and either one are easily switched out for a competitor's product, I'll be comfortable using their various services in spite of dominance in various markets.

patio11 17y ago
There is no lock-in with Google, and that makes all the difference. I don't know, considering they're responsible for something like 80% of my business most days I'm feeling pretty freaking locked in...
- turtle4 17y ago
  No, you're feeling dependent. There's a difference. If you are using 80% of their services now, it is because you feel like you are getting good return on them. If you decide that isn't the case in the future, as the original poster said, it is easy to move whatever portion of their service you aren't happy with to another provider. If there isn't another provider that offers the same level of service and the same ability to walk away that Google does, that isn't lock-in, and it isn't really Google's fault. I do wish there was another email provider that I felt had as strong an offering as gmail does, just in case.
  - chaosmachine 17y ago
    He's talking about search traffic to his business. I feel the same way. It's scary knowing that if one company blacklists you, you basically disappear from the internet. Google provides 99% of my incoming search traffic (even though I rank higher on other engines).
    - ptomato 17y ago
      What are you saying, exactly? Should google endeavor to make their search results worse so that more people use other search engines? A simple monopoly based on the excellence of a freely provided service is not necessarily a bad thing, especially considering that search engines do not particularly inspire customer loyalty. If google becomes dramatically worse and other search engines become dramatically better they will lose the majority of their users without much difficulty, just like yahoo, ask, etc. lost their users when google got big.
      - chaosmachine 17y ago
        Should google endeavor to make their search results worse so that more people use other search engines I'm not suggesting anything like that. I'm simply pointing out that for many of us, Google traffic is a SPOF. How to go about fixing that, who knows. Some people are claiming Twitter is the future of traffic, but I don't think so, at least not for most sites.
        ptomato 17y ago
        The way to fix it is simple: have other search engines leapfrog google in the same way that google leapfrogged the existing ones.
rbanffy 17y ago
"There is no lock-in with Google" While Microsoft owned the program and the data format my data was stored, Google owns the program, the data format and the server my data is stored in. I am not sure how comfortable I should feel. Data export facilities are your friends.
- cdibona 17y ago
  Which Google projects are you unable to export your data from? I'm happy to point you to the interface to do so or pass on the request to the data liberation team in Chicago. For mail, contacts, reader opmls, docs/spreadsheets/etc there are exporting facilities and in some cases (like in blogger) mass export tools that Google has written to make it easier, in essence, to leave. Some tools aren't as easy to export from, yet. As to the "server your data is stored on" we won't be shipping that to you anytime soon :-)
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    That's precisely why I said "Data export facilities are your friends." They exist. I am aware I can pull my data off Google's servers anytime I want, but, if such interfaces or facilities become unavailable, I will be stuck. Recently, I received a lot of e-mails about my Yahoo 360 account. I have no data there, but, still, someday soon (if not already) all data in those servers will be gone. From first warning to total obliteration, a mere couple months have passed. I had vacations longer than that. That's why I keep all my important data nicely backed up someplace I control.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
encoderer 17y ago
Effortless? You are currently using 1794 MB (24%) of your 7345 MB. How can I "Effortlessly" move my 18,000 emails to another provider? How can I "Effortlessly" replace my need to cater to Der Googlebot for the assurance of keeping happy my largest source of traffic? All I'm saying is... if 3/4 of all toll free phone calls to American businesses were routed thru a single provider, that company would be regulated by the Government. I don't necessarily thing Google should be regulated, but I do think you are naieve if you think the existence of Google circa 2009 isn't as dangerous as Microsoft circa 1999.
- ptomato 17y ago
  They provide pop3 access that lets you download all 18000 of those emails. You can then do whatever you want with them. Certainly set up your own webmail system on a server, say. Oh store them locally in mail-client-of-your-choice. Or import them into any other webmail service that supports importing from pop3 (none come to mind, but it would be fairly trivial to implement.)
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
stcredzero 17y ago
There is no lock-in with Google, and that makes all the difference. Companies that are making an effort to use lock-in to keep you are not using that effort to keep you by giving you good customer service and user experience. A "no lock-in" policy supports quality. It says that a company is going to live or die by quality, not by something that sucks for the customer.
srw 17y ago
> There is no lock-in with Google, and that makes all the difference. The iPhone came with Google Maps, and Google/Yahoo search box. Try to add your own search box to the iPhone... worst, in the past there was an antimonopoly inquiry attacking Microsoft for integrating their IE on the OS, now Google under the [buzzed] "Open Source" lemma, give you less web APIs in the web than Microsoft in the OS.

by tjogin 17y ago

patio11 17y ago

There is no lock-in with Google, and that makes all the difference. I don't know, considering they're responsible for something like 80% of my business most days I'm feeling pretty freaking locked in...

turtle4 17y ago
No, you're feeling dependent. There's a difference. If you are using 80% of their services now, it is because you feel like you are getting good return on them. If you decide that isn't the case in the future, as the original poster said, it is easy to move whatever portion of their service you aren't happy with to another provider. If there isn't another provider that offers the same level of service and the same ability to walk away that Google does, that isn't lock-in, and it isn't really Google's fault. I do wish there was another email provider that I felt had as strong an offering as gmail does, just in case.
- chaosmachine 17y ago
  He's talking about search traffic to his business. I feel the same way. It's scary knowing that if one company blacklists you, you basically disappear from the internet. Google provides 99% of my incoming search traffic (even though I rank higher on other engines).
  - ptomato 17y ago
    What are you saying, exactly? Should google endeavor to make their search results worse so that more people use other search engines? A simple monopoly based on the excellence of a freely provided service is not necessarily a bad thing, especially considering that search engines do not particularly inspire customer loyalty. If google becomes dramatically worse and other search engines become dramatically better they will lose the majority of their users without much difficulty, just like yahoo, ask, etc. lost their users when google got big.
    - chaosmachine 17y ago
      Should google endeavor to make their search results worse so that more people use other search engines I'm not suggesting anything like that. I'm simply pointing out that for many of us, Google traffic is a SPOF. How to go about fixing that, who knows. Some people are claiming Twitter is the future of traffic, but I don't think so, at least not for most sites.
      - ptomato 17y ago
        The way to fix it is simple: have other search engines leapfrog google in the same way that google leapfrogged the existing ones.

rbanffy 17y ago

"There is no lock-in with Google" While Microsoft owned the program and the data format my data was stored, Google owns the program, the data format and the server my data is stored in. I am not sure how comfortable I should feel. Data export facilities are your friends.

cdibona 17y ago
Which Google projects are you unable to export your data from? I'm happy to point you to the interface to do so or pass on the request to the data liberation team in Chicago. For mail, contacts, reader opmls, docs/spreadsheets/etc there are exporting facilities and in some cases (like in blogger) mass export tools that Google has written to make it easier, in essence, to leave. Some tools aren't as easy to export from, yet. As to the "server your data is stored on" we won't be shipping that to you anytime soon :-)
- rbanffy 17y ago
  That's precisely why I said "Data export facilities are your friends." They exist. I am aware I can pull my data off Google's servers anytime I want, but, if such interfaces or facilities become unavailable, I will be stuck. Recently, I received a lot of e-mails about my Yahoo 360 account. I have no data there, but, still, someday soon (if not already) all data in those servers will be gone. From first warning to total obliteration, a mere couple months have passed. I had vacations longer than that. That's why I keep all my important data nicely backed up someplace I control.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

encoderer 17y ago

Effortless? You are currently using 1794 MB (24%) of your 7345 MB. How can I "Effortlessly" move my 18,000 emails to another provider? How can I "Effortlessly" replace my need to cater to Der Googlebot for the assurance of keeping happy my largest source of traffic? All I'm saying is... if 3/4 of all toll free phone calls to American businesses were routed thru a single provider, that company would be regulated by the Government. I don't necessarily thing Google should be regulated, but I do think you are naieve if you think the existence of Google circa 2009 isn't as dangerous as Microsoft circa 1999.

ptomato 17y ago
They provide pop3 access that lets you download all 18000 of those emails. You can then do whatever you want with them. Certainly set up your own webmail system on a server, say. Oh store them locally in mail-client-of-your-choice. Or import them into any other webmail service that supports importing from pop3 (none come to mind, but it would be fairly trivial to implement.)
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

stcredzero 17y ago

There is no lock-in with Google, and that makes all the difference. Companies that are making an effort to use lock-in to keep you are not using that effort to keep you by giving you good customer service and user experience. A "no lock-in" policy supports quality. It says that a company is going to live or die by quality, not by something that sucks for the customer.

srw 17y ago

> There is no lock-in with Google, and that makes all the difference. The iPhone came with Google Maps, and Google/Yahoo search box. Try to add your own search box to the iPhone... worst, in the past there was an antimonopoly inquiry attacking Microsoft for integrating their IE on the OS, now Google under the [buzzed] "Open Source" lemma, give you less web APIs in the web than Microsoft in the OS.