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Comment by orangethirty | Hacker News Reader

Just like PG said in one of his essays, Google is now the new Microsoft. It used to be about giving hackers tools to build on top of their services. Now, its all about turning the search engine into a social network.

And before the Google army comes in, let me say one thing. I used to love Google. Used all of their services. Built stuff with their services. Each computer I touched got Chrome installed. I was a fan boy. But then they started changing. Ever since G+, they just seem hell bent on becoming a social network. That shit really pissed me off. How do you simply go from awesome company to this? I'll tell you how. Because its now being run by people who put profits first, and not the users/programmers. They seem to have forgotten that it was us who gives them the profits they get. Such is the reason I'm building Nuuton. Because fuck you Google.

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As someone often accused of being a Google "fanboi"... I agree. I'm not going to abandon Go or Chrome or anything because they are fully OSS so if Google drops them it isn't the end of the world, but I wouldn't dream of building a service (even a free for-fun one) on top of some Google Web API these days.

Maybe that's fine with them (seems like they have a corporate mission to eliminate the whole idea of free or nearly-free web APIs anyway), but regardless of their motivations they've proven to be a non-reliable provider of stable free-to-use web APIs over the past couple of years.

Yeah, that's the crazy aspect to this. I really like Go, Chrome, and a lot of the other things they offer. But to quote a character named Mr. Lahey from from the tv show "Trailer Park Boys": "Its all a shit-storm now."

You can't built bridges on top of shaky ground.

Chrome isn't OSS. You're thinking of Chromium.

Chromium for Android is a joke. It doesn't even have tabs and has nothing in common with Chrome. I wonder what they need to hide.

Google is clearly not an open source company.

When was Google ever an open source company? Search, Gmail, Buzz, G+, .... what is it they do do open source?

Embrace, extend, extinguish [1].

We have heard it before, with Microsoft, we are hearing it again with Google, and we will hear it again with someone else in the future.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

I think a lot of the fingerpointing at Google has been ridiculous and way overblown. But there have been a few things, and I think the services they've shut down (eg, Wave and Labs and now Reader) are a good indicator of their new "focus".

With the death of Reader, my last shred of goodwill is basically gone. I've used an @gmail.com address for the past six years despite having my own domain, and now that's going to stop as I gradually transition off most of their services.

always use your name@YOURdomain.com. Google, yahoo and MS can always cut you off in a heartbeat. With your own domain, you can forward it to a new provider.

That's why I will 'never' embrace cloud that tightly.

> And before the Google army comes in, let me say one thing. I used to love Google. Used all of their services. Built stuff with their services. Each computer I touched got Chrome installed. I was a fan boy. But then they started changing.

Just because they didn't satisfy your demands you decide to take such a drastic turn? Perhaps they were trying to satisfy other casual Internet users as well.

Not to say you're wrong or whatever, but a huge company like Google tries to satisfy as many people as possible to increase their market-share. I don't necessarily see something wrong as long as all the negative side affects aren't solely absorbed by the consumer.

There's nothing wrong with compromises here and there - any healthy relationship consistently needs to deal with them.

I don't think that Google showing a propensity to give services the axe, rather than simply deprecating them and giving them little or no support is a case of "not satisfying demands." That, mixed with their history of spotty support for the things which they DO officially support gives them the appearance of being a shifting platform. This lead me, at least, to depend on them as little as I have to.

Hey, that's your opinion and I can't call it wrong! Although I strongly feel like Google Reader was by far the most used service they are going to axe. I was pretty upset when Google Notebook was axed, but I just moved my data elsewhere. I don't really expect much with deprecation after that incident because while the service was deprecated, the lack of support/updates just left me never wanting to use it anymore.

If that is the tipping point for you, then by all means show support for alternatives. I know I do a terrible job at ensuring Google isn't the only player in the game.

Nuuton sounds interesting. For me though, search isn't the biggy, gmail is the big one that I'd love to replace.

I imagine a pinboard.in like service but for mail (cheap, fast, simple, run by a developer that I trust to worst case mail me a DVD of my mail history). I'd jump to that very quickly.

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