No, not really. It's still exceedingly easy to make Google a bit player in your life. For example, I use Apple gear for my home computer / phone / tablet (alt

No, not really. It's still exceedingly easy to make Google a bit player in your life. For example, I use Apple gear for my home computer / phone / tablet (although I have a custom AOSP tablet for work - we flash our own firmware for it though, so it's not really google-y). I use Google for maybe 5% of my searches, I only use GMail for work, and quite frankly we could switch at a moment's notice to another email solution), and I only use Google Maps when I want to look at a map on my work PC, which runs linux. Apart from the 5% of search that I find I need Google for, the rest is very easy to switch out. Compare that to the world of computing in the 90s. Your computer needed to be able to read FAT32. Your web site needed to work well for IE. There was only one valid office suite out there. Most peripherals only came with Windows drivers, shutting everyone else out of the fun. Indeed one part of the rebirth of the Mac was the recognition that peripheral driver support would have to be done in-house, rather than relying on 3rd parties to provide Mac drivers for their products. The Microsoft dominance of the 90s made computing on competing platforms difficult. Google does not have anything like that level of domination / lock-in.