My disillusion with Google has been years in the making. I know I’ve written about it before on my blog so i won’t go into a deep dive on those thoughts. Maybe, just maybe my related posts plugin will find it so i don’t have to go searching through hundreds of posts.
But, the latest straw with my now hate/loathe relationship with Google is over their stance on net neutrality. Put simply, before Google got into the cellphone market, they were all for keeping the net open for everyone, and rejected having different tiers of service and cost for entry to the web. Now, they have Android and want to buddy up with Verizon to make even more money with their cellphone operating system and their content sites.
There has been a ton of outrage to this stance, which of course is welcomed (and a bit surprising with how much tech sites cater to Android and Google) but what is really needed is a mass exodus from Google sites and services.
One small problem though – where would people turn to in lieu of using Google for search and email?
Bing is still a pretty crappy site. The ui isn’t horrible, but the results are suspect and because hardly anyone uses it (comparatively speaking of course) it doesn’t make a lot of sense for me as a search engine marketer to stop using Google.
For email, I use Mobile Me and Gmail. It would be really hard for me to ditch Gmail completely because although Mobile Me has made some improvements to their service, its problem is that it is slow as hell. It also doesn’t have some of the organizational flexibility in managing messages and contacts that Gmail does. If it does, well i haven’t found those options.
