| Reading his service-by-service comments paints a much less favorable picture of his Google "divorce": Search: Push (possible win with DuckDuckGo booleans, possible loss with Craigslist search) Mail: Push (mainly using own server, Yahoo vs Gmail not an issue). Maps: Acceptable, but significant loss. ("Mapquest is ok. Yahoo! Maps are my go-to" and "Yahoo! Maps UI isn't very good, but the maps are quite usable"). Music and Videos: Loss. Spotify covers music, Vimeo and DuckDuckGo search covers some (most?) videos, but the overall process described is pretty painful. Many alternative video sites are likely tracking him as well (despite attempted countermeasures). Images: Push. Happy using private Flickr and Shutterfly, no noted advantages. Social Networking: Push. Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter (occasional) cover most things. No indication of whether or not he reasonably matched his 3000 Google+ relationships. GPS: Not used. Google Translation: Loss. "Babelfish is ok. Others do well, too. None are as good as I would like." Apps: Not used / push. So... depending on whether you break out Music and Videos and whether you count Apps, that's three clear losses out of 7-9 services, with no obvious win (other than the divorce itself). To me that doesn't look very good. |
It's weird because product-for-product, Google has great web services but their issue is that so much of the UI is dedicated to advertising that it makes the overall experience worse. Here.com is owned by Nokia but there is no indication of that apart from a tiny copyright notice in the bottom left of the page.