[bad_user]

Microsoft has alternatives for mostly everything, including Google Apps if you're willing to switch to Exchange and pay the price for that.

But all these Google products are hard to switch from because they are kick-ass. It's hard for me to switch away, not because Google has me trapped, but because the competition sucks.

You can export all your data from Google and import it wherever you want. I did so with Google Reader (since you mentioned), but I came back to it since it's better than any desktop client I tried.

But this doesn't mean Google has lock-in, unless you extend the definition to include "being better than the competition" and that shouldn't trigger antitrust regulation; and if it did, you could say that the system is terribly broken.