When Google makes the decision that I'm not worth much, I'm tempted to reciprocate.

DuckDuckGo is already becoming habit, and I'm pretty close to convincing others in my company that we need to switch off of Google Apps, because Google hides important messages from me and doesn't provide support [1]. What else does Google do? Drive? Dropbox is better. Plus? Haha. Google is putting all their effort behind things they're only mediocre at, chasing after the fashionable new kids on the block, and dropping the ball on their core competencies. Maps will keep me around for a while though. However, a maps app that cared about my privacy would win me over...

Every giant sees their peak and gradual decline. Google's just came very quickly. I hope they see a renaissance.

[1] http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/gmail/aU4UUye3...

You can't hand-wave away the fact that Gmail, Docs, and Maps are best-in-class.

Of course I can, particularly if they are best-in-class in a class that is not relevant to me. I'm not going to use web apps for email or for office documents, except for edge cases. And that is the case for most people in the world, web apps are a nicety, but not the primary use case.

Maps, as I said, are different.

I think you're extrapolating your opinion to "most" people. Gmail is extremely popular, and while Docs is no Gmail, it has no serious competition for cloud-based editing.

Even if you're not using Gmail's webapp, it's an entire email infrastructure serving as the backend for Mail.app or Mailbox or whatever you use. At this point, if someone doesn't have their own mail server, they're probably using Gmail.

> Apparently, the Reader users aren't worth that much.

How would Google know when it never tried to monetize them? (See above threads discussing this with quotes from people on the Reader team.)

Only a worthless person can say something that worthless. You are not worth anything. See i can write that too.