To me, the biggest problem I have in my interactions with Google (and it's growing over time) is that I never feel like their customer. I don't pay them anything (now that they've sold Motorola, they don't make phones, and they don't seem to charge for the OS on the phone), they don't have products I can buy. They just... put stuff out for me to use, and make money off ads. So there's this rather disquieting mismatch between what I as a user want from them and what they do, because their money doesn't come from me, it comes from people who buy ads. And they need to put SOME effort into user satisfaction, because they need users to have someone to look at the ads that they sell, but there's still a mismatch between user wants and Google offerings. Google Reader is probably the canonical example -- yeah, it wasn't a widely used service, but the users it did have were devoted, and might even have paid to keep using it. But it didn't matter, as Google Reader didn't line up with how Google wanted to sell ads now. So it got the axe. And it's in those moments of powerlessness -- where you have no say over what Google does, because you're not its customer, you're just its user -- that Google loses its appeal. It's not evil, it may even be a level playing field. But that sort of user powerlessness makes me uncomfortable using Google stuff going forward.