[OGinparadise]

Microsoft gets a lot of beating for changes to Windows, simply because of widespread use; an OS with 0.5% market share will not be messing with so many people. By being banned by Google you lose your email, youtube, adsense, adwords, docs...your financial life could be destroyed, even if the 'violation' is for an unrelated offense (example: posting copyrighted material on Youtube and getting adsense disabled)

[tracker1]

Another difference, as an example, when the company I work for had some issues with the hosted mail from MS, my boss was able to get to a real, live person .. not left fluttering in the breeze as so often happens with google.

The handful of times I've had issues, I usually take to twitter, and it magically gets resolved within a day... I'm overly tethered to google at this point. via Andriod and Google Voice alone, it's been a difficult weekend with the issues GV seems to have had since Friday. I've recently cloned my dropbox to both google drive, and skydrive... which gives me a little security.

For the past two years, I've been using my gmail address more, and my own domain email less, because the gmail ui has been more convenient... without igoogle/reader I don't think that's as much the case, but if I lost my email (logins for other sites) I'd be boned... I recently had to re-enable a domain on my mail server just to change an old account on a site I needed to recover. Not cool/fun.