Well I’ve gone from being entirely indifferent to strongly disliking Google. I am actively and somewhat successfully in the process of de-googling. I encourage my friends to do the same, with some success. I think the writing is on the wall. Google seems to have no desire to maintain any sort of goodwill or positive feeling amongst the general public, whom it clearly views as a naturally occurring resource rather than a customer base. Nobody can predict the future but I don’t have a good feeling about the future of the company. Perhaps they will be able to diversify, but their recent actions show both that they deeply misunderstand their product and also that they lack good ideas about how to progress and evolve as an organisation. Fuck Google. All my homies hate Google.
The hardest part of ‘de-googling’ is the stranglehold it has on email. Between them and microsoft, I’ve only seen a few companies (small to medium size) that don’t use one of those two as the email. It’s mind-boggling. If either of them ever got testy, they could bring entire sectors down just by using the information stored in emails on.