Long-term reliability and excellence. If you keep shutting down products, who could risk relying on them? Not me, because switching costs are non-trivial.

If you launch ten different chat products (luckily the icons match) and shut them down a few months later, what kind of product mind want to join your company? Not me, because I want to work on products that survive.

If your product hiring pipeline suffers because you keep killing products and you disable customer accounts willy-nilly, who wants to risk falling behind because they are stuck with products designed by designers who never talk to customers? Not me.

So avoiding Google at this point is less about morality and more about insuring yourself against a myopic product strategy and engineers who are not allowed to talk to their customers.

If you want to fix Google, put engineers on call and let them talk to customers. Fire anybody who refuses to talk to customers. The problem will resolve itself in 6-12 months.

Of course, it is important to put your money where your mouth is, so to answer your question directly: I am actively de-Googling myself and being very vocal about it because I believe that's the only way to affect change in large corporates who. Here is what I've done:

- Switched from Google to DuckDuckGo. Haven't used Google in over 6 months. - Switched from Chrome to Firefox. Very happy so far. - This week I signed up for Fastmail and switched my MX records over, so Google can't learn show me ads anymore. - Next up is Google Docs. Sheets is going to be tough.

Hey Google, you're screwing up BIG TIME. Talk to your customers!