And that's not to say I've tried. I had a blackberry, used Fastmail.fm, switched to Firefox. Just none of them really hold up against Google's products. They all work, just nowhere near as well as they should.
If there were alternatives I could switch to, I would. Especially their cloud services, but I'm not the one controlling the purse strings on that.
They might not cover all of your personal needs but for most people:
- iOS is as good as or better than Android
- Office is better than Google Docs
- Gmail is still the best web mail but Google mobile/desktop clients are no where near as good as the alternatives
- I find Safari 8 (on Mac) much faster, more efficient, and pleasant to use than Chrome. Firefox is close to Chrome but there are still a few (little) things with it that annoy me.
Memory usuage is also less and I don't get a bunch of non responding Chrome Worker processes.
At the risk of sounding like the old dude in the room (only 34 lol) ... I'd almost swear that I've read a variation of this exact sentence 15 years ago on places like slashdot. Just replace Google with Microsoft ... all their products "just worked", just, nowhere near as they could ;)
I moved to duckduckgo for searches, and let me tell you I'm not going back soon.
I think google's search engine is overrated.
Unless ofcourse, there is a Chrome only website.