[hga]

I know this is not an answer to your question, but the way I address these issues (especially since I have to do more system administration that I'd like to already) it to do business with laser focused companies. I.e. email from Fastmail (although they recently got bought by Opera, but so far besides some growing pains as they build out their base system this has not been a problem), rsync.net for backup (yeah, more expensive per GB than S3 but it does exactly what I want and that was "tornado tested" after the Joplin, Missouri May 22nd 2011 EF5 tornado) and Skype (except they were of course bought by Microsoft ... I and my friends are looking for alternatives since we know we'll need one sooner or later).

Companies that do only one thing well are often a better bet than companies that do many things at whatever level of quality (and while I don't advertise, I do perceive the quality of Google's search "product" dropping due to things like removing + from term modifiers).

[jrockway]

I wouldn't worry about Google's software quality. We do a really good job on that front. Every machine that Google owns is capable of running Gmail, and failover is a planned use case. Data centers can fail, machine can fail, code can fail, and everything will still work for you. (The process is fully automated and regularly tested.) We have an entire job classification for people whose job it is to build automated testing infrastructure -- not write the tests, but write tools to make writing tests easier. We have people to write the tests, too, and of course every developer writes tests. Every code change, no matter how small, is reviewed by one other developer who knows the relevant code deeply. And all changes are tested internally before they ever go public.

So basically, it's pretty rare that you would lose your email. It's happened before, but everything was restored from tape. I run my own email server for fun, but I'd be lying if I said that I did it better than Google.

[hga]

(Note: I was more referring to the fact that your various offerings are of varied level of quality, i.e. you don't have the laser like focus on remote storage like rsync.net, but your reply was entirely useful anyway.)

I don't worry about that level of quality and have e.g. used Google Docs for some very important things, I worry about the Product Manage level of quality. No in the trenches Google programmer up and decided to remove "+" as a search term (and were mulit-word double quoted phrases previously mandatory search terms?).

There's also the political problems that come with size and scope. Google is in the cross-hairs of many governments, and looking at history you can't say it's impossible that ugly things won't happen, e.g. a split that would put Gmail in a less capable smaller company.

Compounding that, to a degree uncommon in the industry, Google has made an all in bet on the Democratic Party and Blue State values. That strikes me as ... unwise in county that for many years has self-identified to Gallup as being 40% "Conservative", 40% "Independent" and 20% "Liberal".

[jrockway]

To be fair, + wasn't really doing much anyway. I found out the other day that Google's segmentation algorithm is so good that you don't even need to put spaces in your search; searching for "givemealistofsearchengines" does!

[hga]

Well, I was using it!

To be fair, I'm not a normal case, I started creating and querying full text retrieval systems for customers and myself in 1991 when I started my half-decade of document imaging work.

But I did use +, e.g. I'd do a query and get too many or the wrong results because one term wasn't being weighed well and then I'd add a + in front of it. Changing that to wrapping it in double quotes would be only an annoyance if the change wasn't entirely gratuitous (as I understand it) to the Google search function.

And, yeah, the segmentation algorithm is very good, although I haven't torture tested it ^_^.

(Side notes: LinkedIn is the only "social network" I'm likely to use in the foreseeable future, Facebook is anathema (they seem to have inverted your "don't be evil" motto) and Google+ is way too dangerous to use because being kicked off it kills the rest of your Google accounts.)

[icebraining]

being kicked off it kills the rest of your Google accounts

Where did you saw that? According to Horowitz (one of their VPs), it doesn't:

    When an account is suspended for violating the Google+ common name 
    standards, access to Gmail or other products that don’t require a Google+
    profile are not removed,

[hga]

This would seem to be a change in policy, and "violating the Google+ common name standards" (which I would not have intended to do or likely have accidentally done) is certainly not the only way to get kicked off of it.

The more Google intertwingles their services the more cascading policy "failures" can put you in a world of hurt. Hence my one company, one service policy. In the case of Google (ignoring membership in some Google Groups, but to a non-Google address) it's Google Docs. (I'm not counting the non-sticky ones like search and Maps.)