However, I can feel the pain in a way: a lot of possible projects I can think of are in danger of being made redundant by some Google project or other. Sometimes I worry about my own future - will there even be things to do in the future, without the backing of a huge corporation with ginormous data centers behind it? Should I do everything I can to become part of a giant corporation now, to be on the save side?

But as Yoda says, fear leads to suffering, so probably it is best not to worry about it too much.

Also, I suppose there will always be customers who don't want to use Google out of principle. But Google will probably have the lions share.

And, Google seems to be strange in a way: they do a lot of things, but only a few things properly. Many cool projects they have just end up being incomplete and poorly tended to.