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> Furthermore, they are competing unfairly: they use their ads profits to dump products on the market at very low prices or for free, killing the (possible) competition

How's that unfair?

I don't fear Google because the cost of switching is low and I only stay with them as long as their products kick ass. Not only that, but they do make it easy to import and export your data using standards on all their products that I use ... GMail has POP3 out of the box, Gdocs can export your docs in whatever format (HTML/OO/PDF/Word/Excel), GReader can export your feeds in OPML.

As far as search engines go, replacing them is ~5 clicks away in both Chrome and Firefox. And from a dev POV, I only care about white-hat seo stuff, like having good articles with semantically correct tagging that all other search engines care about.

I care more about the availability of my data and about my privacy. There's no point in fear mongering about what might be as long as they are playing nice ... trust and reputation have been the foundation of any society for thousands of years, I can't see why that wouldn't continue to work.

E.g. both Apple and Microsoft have betrayed my trust, and now I don't use their products or recommend them anymore. And I don't really miss them that much ;)

> I don't fear Google because the cost of switching is low

Right now it is, but they control the platform. One day they can flip the switch for something you don't like and disable pop3 and imap (saying it's not used by enough people to support it, for example).

You can't roll back from that state. It would be crazy amount of work to screen/page-scrape Gmail.

Also, it takes only one problem on their side to remove your whole email address. How much do you think they care about it, if it happened to you only and you weren't using paid apps with support option?

If they took out my whole email address, it would be back online in a couple of hours, because I use a free account in Google Apps with my own domain.

All of my emails are also downloaded through POP3, not because I think they might be evil ... it's just because I'm not always online and because I don't trust the reliability of anyone (worked in a data-center and I know that shit can happen even when you don't have a single point of failure).

Normal people might get affected, but really, people learn from their mistakes ... as I said, trust and reputation are at the core of any society.

I also think it is somewhat unfair. They have lot of money from their ads, so they can create product in another category (for example GPS), and offer it for free, while other companies who don't have those advertising dollars can't offer their product for free. Basically they can easily kill competition in certain niches, since they can support their product by money gained by another product (Adsense/Adwords). Maybe it is not unlawful, but fair is it not.

> so they can create product in another category (for example GPS), and offer it for free

That specific case I view as a good thing, since turn-by-turn GPS data was provided by an oligopoly for high fees, which is a lot more "unfair" to everybody.

Who gets to decide which kinds of businesses are allowed to make money and which must be free?

So it's unfair to charge people too cheaply, but not to charge them too much? That seems to be an implication of your post.

Usually the market.

Really? So when one company is getting all its revenue from ads and gives things away free in other market segments it is the market that decided those areas weren't worth anything? Care to sight any credited economics sciences people who explain this?

I don't mean market as just being purchasers but the overall market of suppliers, consumers, and, of course, regulation.

Except in this case, it's a different market.

How's that unfair? It's not that they're stopping anybody from doing the same.

>I don't fear Google because the cost of switching is low

It is today. And it was with MS back in, what, the 80's? How easy is it to switch a big business off of them now?

The point here is that competition is important, and when one party is using an extremely profitable and largely unassailable part of their business to ensure they don't have to compete in others they choose participate in that is dangerous for legitament competition.

And it was with MS back in, what, the 80's?

Not in the 80s that I remember. Back then you didn't have a network, or portable file formats, and even the floppy disks - if they were the same size - were formatted differently for every operating system, and switching to another OS often meant switching to a different machine with a different architecture (and machines were damned expensive back then!), and you couldn't expect to take any applications, peripherals, and probably data with you. And those are pressures that apply to those who probably only had one system. If you were a business with more than one microcomputer, or you needed to share data with someone else, then the cost of switching was enormous.

In the 80s I lived through, Microsoft was already busy building their empire by keeping customers captive on the upgrade treadmill. We were kept on the treadmill through the high cost of switching, and through the fear of incompatibility with whatever we might want to switch to.

Jaiku and Buzz didn't exactly kill Twitter. Orkut didn't kill Facebook. Latitude didn't kill Foursquare. Google Code didn't kill GitHub. Knol didn't kill Wikipedia. Smaller companies still manage to get ahead of Google by innovating, it's not just a matter of big money.

How many of the things you mentioned are free themselves or also bankrolled by ads? Meaningless comparison as far as I can tell.

I don't follow, why is it meaningless? Just to answer your question Github is mainly supported by a paid model, Twitter was free of ads until some days ago, Wikipedia is supported by donations, not sure about foursquare, facebook is supported by ads and revenues from its platfoorm.

Because what we're talking about here is Google dumping into other markets and ruining businesses. Of course their tactic wont beat free products on price alone, but that doesn't have anything to do with the discussion.

I wish more people thought about this. Google isn't a charity, and even if their leaders really were benevolent they wont be there forever.

No, Google is a company subject to the forces of a free market ... competition, choice, advancements in technology, natural selection.

An economy where everybody gets their products / utilities from charities ... is called communism ;)

True but the only part they are actually subject to "the forces of a free market" is advertising, where they exhibit monopolistic behaviors (e.g. phone browsers being locked into google search). Every where else can be a "loss leader" for them which is extremely dangerous.

They really don't seem all that monopolistic to me. A company that has a "Data Liberation Front (http://www.dataliberation.org/) allowing you to switch out of their services at any time is hard to argue as a monopoly. Furthermore, I can search Yahoo or Bing from my Droid just fine, the only thing that's "locked in" is the phone wide search, which I'd say is somewhat reasonable. You aren't forced to use that feature even if you're using Android. I agree that people should be wary of them, but calling their behavior monopolistic is stretching it.

> On a more serious note, I really don't see why everyone is getting so excited about their devices becoming dumb terminals and giving away their power to corporations that own the cloud.

Because it is enormously more efficient from a societal point of view.

The important thing is to have choice, many providers, many platforms, and prevent lock-in.

> Furthermore, they are competing unfairly: they use their ads profits to dump products on the market at very low prices or for free, killing the (possible) competition. For now this has been good for the consumer, with two observations: you're not getting something for free, you're paying with your privacy; once google gets big enough it may get to be the only player in some markets and that always ends badly.

Rather than resist the coming of the cloud, instead support competitors to adsense/words. I can't be the only one who thinks that a free OS, free Docs, free [insert here] in return for letting Google know what kind of products I like is not just a good trade, for a fabulously excellent one.

I only worry that if Google might stop innovating if they get too big, which is why it's essential that Bing is around, and Yahoo, and DDG, and so on, and competitors like iAds that can make a dent in their ad business.