I guess what I wanted to call attention to that was relevant to Google was:
1) Did users lose anything by trying Helpouts that was special? Besides time, which comes with trying anything new.
2) Google tries really hard to warn users of services shutting down. Google Reader had a bunch of notice. Wave ended up being open sourced and handed off to a different project manager.
3) Google tries hard to avoid vendor lock-in. Take a look at https://www.google.com/settings/takeout or I can use the example of Google+ photo albums that put the download or export button front and center so I can upload them to Flickr if I want.
Now don't think I'm a huge Google advocate blind to their issues. In fact, what I was trying to call out was a healthy amount of skepticism to their product launches based on previous situations and comments around Google.
Google Reader didn't allow export of all the saved blogs they had archived that were no longer live. You had to write your own scraper to get the data out of Reader.
1) Did users lose anything by trying Helpouts that was special? Besides time, which comes with trying anything new. 2) Google tries really hard to warn users of services shutting down. Google Reader had a bunch of notice. Wave ended up being open sourced and handed off to a different project manager. 3) Google tries hard to avoid vendor lock-in. Take a look at https://www.google.com/settings/takeout or I can use the example of Google+ photo albums that put the download or export button front and center so I can upload them to Flickr if I want.
Now don't think I'm a huge Google advocate blind to their issues. In fact, what I was trying to call out was a healthy amount of skepticism to their product launches based on previous situations and comments around Google.