[el_programmador]

God forbid if Google lifted their hands some day, can you even imagine how many million people will be impacted due to how many services ranging from emails to map apps to cloud services to web services, etc? Is it wise to give one entity power over so many things or its better to encourage a decentralized structure where multiple organizations control only bits of the pie?

[duxup]

At least with takeout I know I have regular backups.

That's more than most places offer.

[tmpz22]

Have you looked through the takeout outputs though? They are completely worthless to most users. It's funny to me that a bunch of Google devs built the functionality and thought "ya this will do".

[adrianmsmith]

What's wrong with the data?

I mainly care about Google Docs and Sheets, they're exported as Word and Excel (and there are other options if you don't like this formats), and the random sample of docs I tried in the output worked fine in Word and Excel.

[filleduchaos]

How are the takeout outputs useless? Mail for example comes as a nice standard mbox

[thinkingkong]

I doubt the devs have much influence over the scope of the data output. The goal there is minimum for legal, compliance, or pr reasons.

[judge2020]

https://mboxfile.com/google-takeout/

[jacquesm]

Takeout is useless without Google. Also: gsuite doesn't really have a backup feature. You're locked in for all that it's worth.

[duxup]

Why is it useless?

[jacquesm]

Try restoring it. A backup is only good if you can make it work again, and an export function is only good if there is something else that you can import it back into.

[duxup]

I guess I'm missing how that relates to the comparison I made.

Google at least lets me back things up.

Most services do not allow it at all.

So there's no restoring anywhere else at all, no chance.

Having the data I could at least have a chance that some service might offer a rebuilt import option to pick up those google users ... or I could build it myself / at least have the information.

To me that's still leaps and bounds better than any other options that I know of.

[notechback]

The GDPR obliges all companies to provide an option for users to receive all data held on them; takeout and FB'd equivalent were implemented in response to that.

For all other companies, at least if you are in the EU, you should he able to request the data by eg email and they are obliged to send it. You just don't know what format you'll get.

[unqueued]

Yeah, a lot of exported data is basically unidirectional.

Google Voice exports your texts into a clumsy pile of HTML files. That's why I wrote a parser to convert all of your Google Voice messages into structured data.

https://github.com/unqueued/googlevoiceparse

[lonelappde]

Takeout doesn't work for users with substantial data.

[duxup]

What does it do?

Does it not provide the data?

[hobo_mark]

From when I last tried (and retried several times), it fails to export everything so you only get a partial snapshot with random pieces missing.

[zokier]

Sure, it is a genuine concern. But I find the context for the comment here bit funny considering how much the world runs on top of gdocs etc, the risk of losing the source of personal blog is drop in a ocean.

And while there of course are no guarantees, I at least would expect fair warning before stuff like docs is killed.

[lonelappde]

The ocean is made of drops.

[hombre_fatal]

I don't think the cost of losing things is as high as you imagine. You can use X until it fails and then you can use Y.

I also don't think your doomsday scenario makes much sense either. What do you mean "lifted their hands" and why would it happen out of the blue with zero warning? Though I'll repeat: so what?

I don't think a decentralized system is much better in this regard. It just means things rot at a more staggered pace. Service A shuts down on year 0, service B shuts down on year 10, etc. It's just a different trade-off, not the panacea we like to pretend it is.

[austin223]

Absolutely agree. Unfortunately I don’t think nations like the US will ever have the balls to break up their wonder children.

[hencq]

You mean like the US did with AT&T? I'm not sure if they 'have the balls' currently, but they have in the past and it's not inconceivable they would do so again. Microsoft came close to it as well.

[zokier]

I do point out that US vs AT&T did first major anti-trust settlement in 1913, and the breakup ultimately happened in 1984, or about 70 years later. So maybe we'll see Google breakup too in 2084 or around that time..

[lonelappde]

AT&T reformed as regional monopolies in far less time than it took the government to break up the national monopoly.

[el_programmador]

Nations are ultimately made up of people and they are subject to peoples' pressure. Its the people who we must convince and wake them from their deep slumber.

[crazygringo]

Well, I don't need to trust Google's employees, I trust its shareholders wanting to make money, which will never stop.

Since Google's popular products all contribute to making money in the end, they're not going to stop. Shareholders just wouldn't let it happen. There's a chain of accountability here that goes employees > C suite > board > shareholders.

So I don't quite see what situation you're worried about here.

[lonelappde]

Google's shareholders don't hold substantial voting power. Accountability practically ends at CEO.

[crazygringo]

That's just so factually untrue it's hard to know what to tell you.

Do you understand how corporate boards work? How large shareholders get their own board seats? How boards hire and fire members of the management team?

The idea of a toothless board is a complete fiction. I don't know where you got the idea, but it couldn't be more wrong.

(Perhaps you're confusing it with boards where a single shareholder has more than 50% of shares, thus making the board largely irrelevant because the shareholder controls it. But even in that case, the CEO effectively reports to that shareholder, and there have been many, many, many cases of underperforming CEO's being fired. It happens all the time.)

[johannes1234321]

Point here is that in Alphabet the voting power is for the largest part within the founders. Other shareholders can't do much against them.

[judge2020]

if by some magical event Alphabet/Google is able to shut down their free versions of their Office apps and rely solely on G Suite/YouTube/Waymo/etc without losing money, I don't doubt they would do it. If that event will ever happen is still a mystery and is probably unlikely to happen within my/our lifetimes.