[harel]

But what is one to do, when a large collection of tools from one provider ends up being superior to others? I'm not religious, and if someone offered me a better-than-Gmail alternative that works better for me, I'd take it. Give me a better search engine - I'm there. In the same way that I'm using Facebook and not G+ because I find the party is better over there with all of my friends.

[john61]

It is called a trap.

[harel]

Not if you don't feel trapped nor care about it being so. Every service coming up with a superior level product which then has to support it at scale will have to resort to charging users or showing them ads and using their 'data' as a channel to target ads by. Yes Google is a trap and so is Facebook, skype, iOs, windows, mac, linux. You choose what you like to use, get used to it or not find anything better and are trapped with it. Until you chose not to because you are either paranoid or something better came to be.

[john61]

No Linux is not a trap, because it is Free Software. Freedom is the contrary to a trap.

[harel]

Its a trap to me because I don't like windows and osx. I'm trapped in a bash shell. :-)