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Comment by da_n | Hacker News Reader

At this point Google has proven it only wants to focus on profitable ventures or those that tie into Google +. Any service/data aggregation that Google is solely depended on should be considered at risk of closure at any time, and such closure should not come as a surprise. Personally I am moving away from Google except for only the least valuable services; my email, calendar and everything else are moving elsewhere to paid services. It is the end of the age of innocence for Google.

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Google makes a lot of money on Gmail/Calendar (http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/), so they are very unlikely to go away.

Wouldn't it make more sense to not pay for your email, calendar and everything else and wait until Google warns you and gives you months to migrate all of your data to a competing service?

"until Google warns you and gives you months to migrate all of your data to a competing service"

That's a big assumption. Google could axe a service tomorrow with no notice (which apple has a tendency of doing)

But they typically haven't. They've had an excellent track record so far of giving reasonable notice.

I don't argue with that logic. But it isn't that I believe they will close down email/calendar, they have just made me re-consider how much of my critical online services I have invested in them, and I no longer trust them with something I believe is very valuable, my time and my data. With Reader, now I need to re-invest my time into finding another service. That sounds entitled, but there has been an exchange between me and Google all this time, I have used their services, of which they had many historically, and they have thrown ads at me and harvested my data. They still make money out of me despite me not being the one paying them. Now, they have decided that they want to cut out all the periphery services which they deem unprofitable. Ironically, the periphery 'unprofitable' services they are cutting were the only things that kept me using them, getting rid of Reader is essentially the last straw, I want a healthier relationship when it comes to my critical online services going forward, Google now offers me very little incentive to stay so invested in them. They will still get my money from Play Store, I will still use YouTube, but I no longer will be using them for essential services.

Just because you are moving to other services doesn't mean that those services will be around forever either. Short of running your own servers, you really can't be sure any service you subscribe to will be around indefinitely. That is the nature of online services.

I get that and I agree. I guess the key is to ensure any service you move to has an export functionality and should be standards based. I also believe that using multiple services, each of which is built around a core service, be it email, file sync, RSS (not sure who yet) is going to be far less likely to drop that product like Google are doing, unless they just go out off business.

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