[Silhouette]

That a bad plan comes from a famous person doesn't make it any less of a bad plan.

In the spirit of Google: +1 for people and +2 for companies now actively moving away from almost all Google properties because they're becoming so unpleasant and/or unproductive to use. I know they're all about being data driven and running empirical tests: that's why the {expletive deleted} page moves around every time I come back and visit something, which is probably the single most annoying thing they've been lately. The very fact that they're running so many tests is materially reducing the value of their services to us.

Ironically, our exodus started with abandoning our business G+ pages, because they have generated so little interest that they aren't even worth a few minutes now and then to update them any more. It appears that literally no-one we care about is actually using Google+.

[leoc]

> That a bad plan comes from a famous person doesn't make it any less of a bad plan.

But I didn't say that the plan was a good one (or a bad one), just that this action and similar ones do seem to be in accord with that top-down plan rather than the result of independent action by lower-level people.

[vdaniuk]

Do you have any proof that significant number of people are moving away from almost all Google properties? This sounds very anecdotal.

[Silhouette]

I'm merely offering an anecdotal view and make no claim otherwise, though FWIW it's a pattern I've now seen with multiple clients who previously had varying levels of Google dependence as well as my own companies and myself personally.

The thing that made me mention it was that so many of the reasons given by so many of the people involved are fundamentally the same. If what I've seen is at all representative, Google are increasingly perceived to be a security/privacy risk (though this is hardly unique among cloud services) and perhaps worse for them, they're not perceived to be a stable long-term bet (too many dropped products, too many unwanted changes happening too fast, nothing special in terms of quality or features, and little support for users).

Some of these factors presumably won't be as damaging to Google in the consumer market, or at least not as quickly, so I don't see their main advertising business dying any time soon. However, to businesses with real money on the line and organisation-wide IT strategies to plan, Google's overall offering looks increasingly unattractive. For example, Google Docs/Drive/Apps have been tried by various groups I know. None is still happy with them, and several have been forced to move at least some of their activities to alternative systems because the Google ones just weren't capable of getting those jobs done. Chrome is another example I've more often heard mentioned between curse words than flattering ones recently. And I already mentioned in another post the horrible experience we had trying to organise some Google Ads.

Google's resilience appears to stem in part from traditional alternatives shooting themselves in the foot by also pushing to cloud-based offerings and therefore immediately running into similar concerns. Even so, Google seem to be getting worse faster than everyone else.

[grimman]

Another anecdote here, but I jumped the GOOG ship long ago and apart from a very minor bump (adjusting to DDG) it was painless too. Sure, for a couple of days when I was unhappy with results I went back to Google, but they were no better. And sure, some Gmail features are great. But on the whole, they're not irreplaceable, and I reckon they need to take better care of their customers than they currently are.

[dredmorbius]

I've got little more than anecdata to contribute as well.

Personally, I make use of some Google products but have been very consciously trying to shift away from them. Too much data, too long a retention period, and too obvious a target for snoops (ours, theirs, black hats). I'm increasingly uncomfortable with the prospect.

A few years ago, now, I was at a conference largely serving NGOs and the question of cloud computing came up. The idea was fairly novel then, and I expected the discussion to focus on technical aspects -- "how do we move our services to the cloud" type questions. Nuh uh.

It was virtually all about privacy, data control, jurisdictional control, and other legal issues, as well as some discussion of lock-in and similar issues. Now, I think of these things, and they come up on a corporate context, but for these people, many of whom deal with refugees, undocumented aliens, whistleblowers, and others basically in fear for their livelihoods if not their lives, these were all very, very real issues. And this was years before Snowden's disclosures.

Mind, I've followed online privacy issues for a few decades (and butt heads regularly with Lauren Weinstein on G+ over how significant Snowden's leaks were -- I say they're tremendous, he generally claims otherwise), but this level of direct awareness and concern in a largely non-technical audience was eye-opening.

For myself:

I decided to check out G+ and have stayed with it (though I quickly deleted my Real Name account). It has mostly not been particularly useful ... until early in 2013 where I found that rather than commenting about G+, I was actually using it to engage on other topics. I still see it as flawed (and quite possibly fatally so) in conception, but the technical underpinnings are very solid: the back-ends are fast, stable, and highly reliable, and even with rapid and continuous development the site rarely if ever breaks.

Utility-wise it's been another story. The DOM is so bloated I can rarely keep more than a tab or three open (and constantly have to re-kill those to reclaim RAM), the interface is atrocious, the underlying data and interactions models are utterly broken, and more (I've posted long rants many times, they're on my G+ profile, and I'm really beyond caring now). I went to the extent of very extensively modifying the UI through a monster (nearly 2000 lines) CSS stylesheet fixing endless annoyances (to be fair, I do this to many sites, HN included, but none is as extensive as G+). Adding joy to this is Google's obfuscated CSS (it's run through some sort of minimizer) which does wholesale class renaming periodically.

But other than G+ I've been trying to cut Google out. I set DDG as my search engine, returning to Google for a while before committing again this past June. The results are actually quite good, and though I return to Google occasionally, the bulk of my search is DDG.

I've got an Android device tied to Google as well, which I'd very much like to replace with something independent of it.

I make use of a few other services, though mostly not logged in.

And it's not that Google doesn't provide utility. I just have very serious problems with it (or anyone else) watching every breath I take.