Removing Google From My Life

So by the title of this post you must be wondering what Google has done to me. The answer is nothing bad. They’ve removed services I’ve used such as Google Reader, which is not really a big deal. So why am I beginning to remove Google from my life? Google isn’t making moves that are within my best interest. They’re making moves in the best interest of Google. While I can’t point to one reason why, in my heart I feel as though it’s time for me to start breaking up with Google.

When Sergey Brin and Larry Page took control of Google a few years ago things started heading in a negative direction. That’s when the algorithm started favoring big brands and Google started to kill off products. Android stopped releasing big changes to Chrome and Android. Google became a enterprise and not an ideal.

When I started building websites in 1996 I truly believed I was helping human kind. I believed that in my own nerdy way that anything was possible. What I never saw at the time was the shift to mobile.

Android copied IOS. Google was smart because in order to ensure that people kept using Google they needed a mobile OS. As a nerd I loved what I could do with Android. I could grab files on my NAS and put it onto my phone while playing Sega emulators at the same time. I then got into my whole ROM phase and hacked kernels just because I could. Then something happened to me. I stopped giving a shit about tweaking my phone. I just wanted it to work. I stuck with Android because I liked having a selection of phones to choose from. The convo in my head went something like, “if the iPhone only had …”. But that all changed with the iPhone 6. That convo in my head not only stopped but changed to man Android doesn’t have …

Now that the iPhone 6s is here I’m done with Android. For good. But I’m not stopping with Android. I’m done with Google. Not because they’ve done anything bad, because I’m putting my money into companies that I believe in. Because in my own nerdy way I still believe that my dollar counts. I don’t want to give Google another dollar.

The first thing that I have to do is to use another search engine. There’s pretty much Bing and Duckduckgo. I’ve switched to Duckduckgo on my personal Mac and iPhone 5. So step number 1 is taken care of. Next is I have to decide whether I’m using iCloud or @me.com as my new email address. Then I’ll have to move years of emails to one of those services. Then comes the really hard part which is moving all of my logins to one of those email addresses. Last but not least I’m selling my Surface Pro 3.

Thank you Google for the many years of great service but it’s time for me to move on. It’s me and not you.

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