Ask HN: Have you been able to leave Google's claws altogether? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Have you been able to leave Google's claws altogether?

4 pointsgeekam7 comments

Here are the services I use/left:

Search: I have started using DDG a lot. Almost 90% of my searches are on DDG except for some rather specific programming or code searches that do not yield useful results.

Email: Still stuck with Google/Gmail even with my personal email. I had signed up for Google apps for my domain when there was a free version and somehow still continuing that.

Docs: Not sure if there is a reasonably competitive product out there

What other services you've been able to leave along with what I mentioned above. Are there any real alternatives?

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Irony that I see this question now. I did a month long migration recently to migrate away from all of my Google services to alternate services distributed among.

I started with Chrome to Firefox, followed by Gmail to Outlook, Blogger to Jekyll (i did that before), GDocs to Office Online,

Pending are those Gdrive and GoogleAnalytics which I will probably move away as soon I can find an apt alternative.

For docs I like EtherCalc, Etherpad, and MediaWiki. At this point, Gmail is all I use of Google and mostly only get spam. My main email is Zimbra which I host myself. For search, I use DDG but I've been meaning to look into YaCy further. And I've not used a smartphone for a couple years now.

For day-to-day stuff, it's pretty tough to beat Android's Google account integration out of the box. I don't feel a pressing need to "leave Google's claws". This question would make more sense if there was a more clearly defined, well-motivated goal.

Docs: switch to Office 365

Yeah, switch to the company that has locked the world into their proprietary format for the last 2 decades.

They realized it (though its late) and slowly moving away from their Use all MS or Use none MS policy.

They only realize it when they have to because the market forces them to be open. Microsoft is not going to open up and support a good open document standard.

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