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Comment by aneesh | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that he mentioned Android, search, and GMail as services that it'd be hard to stop using. They all have easy substitutes that are arguably just as good, or at least close (iPhone, Bing, Yahoo Mail/Hotmail).

The one place where it's really difficult to stop using Google is AdWords. If you want to buy search ads, Google has a near monopoly, and others can't compete right now. That's where the real "can you even stop using it?" is.

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> iPhone, Bing, Yahoo Mail/Hotmail

Are we really going to position Apple and Microsoft as the heroes to Google's villain?

(That sounds like a bit of a troll, but I don't mean it that way; I just mean that, if you care enough about such matters of principle to boycott Google, surely you can find something in the current or past behaviour of either to turn you off it, too.)

Its about pressure. If Google is stupid enough to make people even contemplate about alternatives, then they would be going on a slippery slope as it is not too difficult to switch, to vote with your legs as it were. Sure Microsoft may be bad, but you have Yahoo search. If you do not like them because of something they do, you can switch from them too, isn't that what free market is all about, alternatives, competition on every variable.

But the previous poster is spot on. There are just as good alternatives to all the services they provide, except perhaps for google maps but that is once in a while use, but they have a monopoly on advertising on the internet and no other alternative even compares.

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