And Google have provided tremendous value with their free tools. People forget what it was like before Gmail and Docs.
I sincerely hope we can move away from their business model, but looks to me consumers rather pay with anything but their money.
So anyone who’s 18 today has never known a world without it.
People don’t know what the save icon is in reality.
Paying for things is interesting as media streaming is frequently valued by paying for it, collaboration and things like Google Maps not so much.
I remember using a Palm Pilot with Tom Tom, and an old maps pack that didn’t have half the new main roads included in the UK! I’d honestly pay for Google Maps for the value I get from it.
You begin a trip with driving directions, but 2/3 of the way in your phone shuts off because you forgot to plug it in. When you get it going again you have no service. You open Google Maps and... nothing. Your directions are gone, and you can't load them again because you don't have network connectivity. I believe due to the restart this is even the case if Maps happens to give you the "download offline directions" option and you accept (which they don't always do). AFAICT there is no way to "reload" downloaded offline directions, only a search bar which does nothing without network connectivity.
Google only really makes things that serve Google's interests, that's why they'll never fix this. If you, the user, put yourself in a situation where you depend on them, you're the sucker. Google has no incentive to actually make the product good for users, they just have to make it good enough that a sufficiently large number of users look at the advertisements in it. I'd much rather buy software and services from a company that has better aligned incentives. That's why I keep a paperback road atlas in my car.
It's hard to beat Google Maps for POI discovery though
We had Google docs before Google released it and it would have prevailed as an independent company if the authorities had had any interest in preventing trust and oligarchy
I don't think you're correctly remembering Writely or early Google docs. Expectations were very different back when ajax was still a cutting edge buzz word.