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Comment by mattferderer | Hacker News Reader

I honestly find it very easy to not use any of their services. They all have quality competitors.

The majority of humans don't find it so easy or necessary.

I agree. As stated in the article the best thing many of these companies do is make their product easier to use. If they actually wanted to use a different service though, do you think they would find it hard?

> The majority of humans don't find it so easy or necessary.

Minority, in fact. You're wildly exaggerating, as is the article.

Half of Facebook's monthly actives barely use the core social network service. That leaves a billion people or so. There are 7.x billion people on the planet. Your majority premise just collapsed.

Google has about 1/3 of global adults as users, with varying frequency. Gmail as an example, has a small share of global email. Again, minority.

Amazon is still a trivial ecommerce presence outside of the US, as a whole and in relation to the number of adults shopping on their service versus the total number of people on earth.

And Apple? Their reach, like the others, is dramatically less than the "majority of humans." Apple reaches a billion people.

Please. Don't be a pedant, you're not advancing any meaningful points. It should be obvious that in the context of this discussion, we are talking about the developed Western world.

Please provide your recommendations. I've been prying myself off of their services but currently, I've not found a solid replacement for:

Facebook: nothing else has the network effect.

Google Drive: online documents are really convenient

Google Voice: what else has seamless integration with either android or ios.

Amazon: Buying household items like toilet paper, dishwasher detergent, etc, saves me a ton of time.

Facebook: Twitter is a decent competitor for network effects. I've moved my photo sharing to Google Photos as it trumps anything Facebook offers. For me, the biggest Facebook benefit is sharing photos with family on Facebook. Everything else on there is pretty much noise or garbage you can find on any other site. The one recent thing that Facebook does better than anyone that I get value out of are "local events".

Google Drive: Dropbox, Box, OneDrive....

Google Voice: Depends what you're using it to do. Amazon & Microsoft have apps you can use that do similar tasks. Whichever you use does require access to a lot of personal data to be useful though, no matter what company you pick.

Amazon: Target, Walmart, Jet, etc... Lots of competition here. Amazon's online experience is typically better but their is plenty of competition & they often have cheaper prices. FYI in case any Target person reads this. Your site is terrible & full of bugs.

Suggesting Facebook and Google and Amazon as serious replacements for Facebook and Google and Amazon really drives the point home.

Nicely said. I did do that for 1.5 out of the 4. While I didn't state it well, my argument was meant to be for replacing one or two of them, not all of them.

Voice is probably the hardest one to replace all 4 of them on.

For Facebook's network effects, I mentioned Twitter which is not one of the four. I did mention that my main use I've replaced with Google Photos. I did that because it's free & great. If I hated Google, I could use several paid services that offer similar benefits. Snapchat is becoming more popular with the older people I know. Instagram was great before getting bought out by Facebook so we can't count them now.

I think maybe one point that needs to be made, is if you want a "free service" you must be willing to let your data be sold. That is the big problem that many people have with a lot of the above free services.

What is the Amazon competitor to Voice? I use Voice for texting from my computer and phone calls (not sure if there are other services it offers)

I'm overlooking the easy "It's easy for me so it's easy for everyone" because I'm interested what phone you use?

He hewed it himself out of the finest hardwoods.

Everyone knows you use soft woods for phones.

Only for the software, not for the hardware, duh!

This guy phones

You can use an Android phone without a Google account or any Google apps.

You can even install an open-source replacement for the core Play Services Framework that many non-Google apps seem to require.

But, let's face it, we're surrounded by garden walls now days.

Take phone as example: You almost only have two main options for a smart phone OS here: iOS (+ Apple) and Android (+ Google).

Android can be used without any connection to Google at all. You have a more limited choice of software (using F-Droid, etc), but it's quite easy to do.

I'm stuck on an iPhone because someone else pays for it. I haven't ever cared to look at the background data being used but I would say on the app side I rarely use a stock Apple app.

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