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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 the

by 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.

by turtle4 17y ago

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.