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Comment by iLoveOncall | Hacker News Reader

Almost none of those are viable alternatives. They're either not free when Google is, a lot more expensive, or have a lot less features.

And recommending Microsoft products or apps owned by the CCP as an alternative to Google products is simply ridiculous.

I would understand going from Google to open source products, even though I am not an open source fanatic, but going from Google to another privately owned for-profit company makes no sense. Is this written by a guy bitter to have been laid of by Google or something like this?

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I too am laughing at the suggestions to swap Google for Microsoft stuff.

I am probably too far gone to be taken seriously, but my startup got acquired and we had to switch from Google to Microsoft and I actually kind of like the Microsoft stuff. It has dark mode! If you're going to be Last Name, First Name at an 80k employee company, at least your calendar can be visually pleasant to look at.

Sure, I don't think Microsoft's stuff is necessarily terrible. At work I've always been fully immersed in Windows and Office, as both a regular user and IT guy, and it's fine for that. I was even using Windows and Edge on my personal laptop as recently as 2021. But if you're trying to get away from Google as a soulless mega-cap corporation that wants to trick you into giving up more of your data, switching to Microsoft doesn't seem like much of a switch.

I think it's totally fine if your reason for wanting to move away from Google is not ideological or privacy-related.

"It's better" is a good reason to switch. But this is clearly not the case in the original article.

For now Google's counterparts still rate better on interoperability (CalDAV, CardDAV).

I agree with you.

That being said, I'd be strongly inclined to believe all your stuff [from Personal Accounts] -- even if only its metadata -- will be fed to OpenAI/Bing's Sidney sooner or later. Same with Google with regards to Bard.

> They're either not free when Google is, a lot more expensive, or have a lot less features.

I'm perfectly willing to pay for a decent service, especially if it appears to actually incentivize the company to care about my my interests.

I fully agree with that, my only point is that they should not be presented are equivalent alternatives

who said they are equivalent?

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