Google is one of those companies that make me feel like a wuss for being their customer. Okay, in this case one could (convincingly) argue that advertisers are the real customers of Google Reader, but I would have gladly just paid for the service. Apple is another such company for me, and I dumped considerable amounts of money into them, and they similarly just let me know with every single action that I'm not their kind of customer.

So the question becomes not "why is everyone using them?" or even "why are they doing things like this?", it starts with people like me who got to ask themselves honestly "why do I keep relying on these guys?".

Gmail is my main email account and it makes me deeply uncomfortable. I love OS X, despite its ever-increasing flaws, and that makes me feel like a hostage experiencing Stockholm syndrome. Facebook is the only thing in this category I actually stopped caring about on my own, but if I'm being honest that's more my friends' fault for re-enacting soap opera scripts online and offline, and less because Facebook is a data-grabbing virus that screws its users over at every turn (which it is).

My only face-saving answer to that conundrum is those products offer me some things that others don't, they have features that large companies are better positioned to deliver on. However, that's not a permanent state of things, as the complex features of yesterday become increasingly more feasible for smaller developers to tackle tomorrow. Maybe it's a good thing that Google and others are finally straight-up bent on filtering nerds like me out of their customer base, maybe that's the kick needed to overcome inertia and complacency.

Agreed on most points. And to be honest, if you're a real customer of Google (we use them for our business) you are treated worse than the "free service" (where you aren't the customer, you're the product). Our work accounts have a fraction of the functionality of our free accounts and the idea that this is somehow doing us a favor ("we only give you the very most stable of our services") is rather unconvincing.

What apps is this the case for? Our Google work stuff is identical to personal Google stuff as far as I can see.

Google Voice was gmail-only for a long time.

Google Plus was as well.

Currently, I am waiting for Google Now's gmail integration to get on apps already: http://support.google.com/nexus/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...

Those are just services that have/are affected/ing me; I'm certain there are plenty of other examples.

I can't speak for the parent, but an issue in this vein that most recently affected me is the months it took google to allow GApps customers to create a google+ account with their apps login.

Gmail for Apps still can't auto-add people to your chat list, even though the option is there.

You really should get off Gmail. At the very least, use a domain and google apps for your domain, to keep the option of fleeing later.

Even for search, there are really only a few companies crawling now -- Google, Bing/MS, and Blekko. I'm going to try Bing for a month (I tried in the past, and it wasn't great, but was close) and Blekko for another month, but I'm pretty sure I don't care about any other Google services.

Respectfully, I know that. And I know you mean well but the purpose of my post was exploring motives why I didn't yet. I know it's not fashionable to conduct oneself around here as anything but infallibly well-informed and doing all the things exactly right, but I wanted to offer a perspective of someone who sometimes exhibits imperfections in regard to the products he uses and the tradeoffs that may play a role in selecting certain kinds of products despite the downsides.

I just meant that it's reasonable to make the tradeoff to trust a vendor like Apple/Google/etc. with whom you have fundamental philosophical differences now, if their product is better than the alternatives. What's not OK is to have no possible way to switch.

Changing an email address or phone # is probably enough of a lock-in to be "impossible". Changing the service provider you use otherwise to provide your phone/email/etc., probably a pain, but possible.

Facebook doesn't support indirection (which is why it's crazy that businesses promote fb.com/site urls), but as you've pointed out, it doesn't actually provide a useful service, so if it goes away, no big loss.

2 more for search, Yandex is growing fast and getting really good, and DuckDuckGo of course. I've been using Yandex a lot lately. Their products are getting more available in English, in fact they have webmail with a built-in RSS reader that resembles google reader.

DDG is essentially passthrough to Google/Bing/Blekko, though, so you're still somewhat exposed to the risk of those companies being crazy. Although I guess 3 is enough that DDG should be able to survive even if 1-2 go crazy or die.

It's perhaps somewhat nationalist, but Russian companies are slightly above Chinese companies on my list of "would I want my traffic going through their infrastructure", from a privacy/information security standpoint. I don't think this is irrational. (The US is far from ideal either, but has stronger laws, although is more likely to be "interested". The ideal would be a Canadian or European search provider run in some kind of hostproof model.)

My vouch wouldn't probably mean much, but yandex are by and large not-evil guys. They can be forced to abide the law, but I believe they haven't willfully done anything really unethical yet. Unfortunately, yandex search is inferior to google for English queries, which diminishes their usefulness a lot.

I tend to trust almost all techies by default, but their government, not so much. The same thing applies to the US, though, although at least in the US there's enough precedent from pre-2001 or pre-1990s to restrain the government slightly. Russia and China don't have the extended period of relative legal sanity the US had from ~1781 to sometime in the 1900s, or common law tradition from England from 1300 onward.

DDG has their own crawler, but its difficult to take on a giant gorilla like Google in one shot.

I think over time DDG will do just fine.

I tried having my own domain's mail for a while, and got burned hard when my (cheap) webhost's servers were down for a couple of days. It's hard to argue with free, easy, and reliable when the alternative is costly, difficult, and more likely to go down.

You don't have to host the email yourself. Just grab your own domain, set up a free gmail account, and forward all the email from your domain to the gmail account. Configure gmail to always send replies as from [email protected].

What this does is eliminate the biggest point of lock-in to gmail. In the worst case scenario you can switch to another email provider with the flick of a DNS entry, no worries about losing your email address.

I switched to http://domains.live.com from google apps for my personal email. The new outlook.com is a LOT cleaner than Gmail.

> it starts with people like me who got to ask themselves honestly "why do I keep relying on these guys?".

Boy, you really summed up my own personal feelings on this. I'm beginning to rethink my own Gmail usage now.

I for one welcome this change as an opportunity for growth. Google has not put any effort into reader for some time now. Maybe some innovative company will get the google reader user base and build something great.

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OTOH I do feel sad that reader is gone as it has been a part of my daily life for many years now. Some say that RSS is dead but I cannot find any alternative to feeds I've collected.

You know what you call a product you don't put much effort into for some time and which is still in daily use by happy users?

Working.

/mutter.

I would like more powerful filtering options and better recommendations. For example, Hacker News feed is impossible to follow as RSS on reader as it has too high volume (for me at least). I would be content with ~40 daily recommendations.

Google reader had decent random recommendations before the G+ update. I believe that a good recommendation system can guess relevant items for given user, but that was not what google reader has been doing for some time now.

I long ago switched to the Hacker News 100 feed: http://talkfast.org/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-news-overlo...

I've been using this RSS feed of top stories: http://hnbest.herokuapp.com/

Thanks! This should really be listed in the HN/rss page.

While it doesn't cost Google much to keep Google Reader going, it does sacrifice ad revenue that would be gained if people visited the website(s).

I know there is an ad service for the feeds but as far as I am aware they aren't very profitable.

Are you sure the shutdown is to foster an illusion?

Maybe there simply isn't a good upside to keep this service going and its a business decision?