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Comment by ancarda | Hacker News Reader

I'm not taking any risks. I'm in the process of moving my email back to self-hosted email from Google Apps. IMO the biggest problem with Google is they have too many products. They seem to behave like "well, our search engine works so our other products must too!".

Rather than producing a few world-class products, Google produces hundreds of mediocre products that only seem world-class because they have the shiny Google logo on them.

Honestly, Google is probably doing the right thing cleaning up all these products, but they'll just introduce new ones. Meanwhile, my confidence and attitude towards Google erodes every day.

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Rather than producing a few world-class products, Google produces hundreds of mediocre products that only seem world-class because they have the shiny Google logo on them.

I would argue that if you limit their competitors in the space to free versions (for products which Google offers free), they ARE world class.

The problem is in the intervening years since that, competitors have also gone free, or prices have dropped enough that it's easier to make a comparison between the Google free product and the competitor with a nominal fee.

Honestly, Google is probably doing the right thing cleaning up all these products, but they'll just introduce new ones. Meanwhile, my confidence and attitude towards Google erodes every day.

You get what you pay for.

Payment for a service is not always with hard currency, but as in this case, with information about ourselves and our connections.

That's well understood, but I would argue that it doesn't always matter (such as in this case, where customers are choosing which service to use), because to many it's not how they see the cost equation.

In short, it doesn't matter how much value Google derives from the transaction, but how much the client feels they spend on it which determines whether they think it's a good deal. If people feel the cost is free, that's what will go in to their internal calculations as to whether to use the Google app or a competitor, and when n comparing "free" to some small cost.

Google gets away with not always having the best app for a service with the trick of looking free, even though strictly speaking they aren't always.

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