Comment Re:That depends... (Score 1) 492
I completely agree with the parent.
To me, the main difference is the way Google makes business decisions with their consumer products. With Gmail, for example, Google really goes out of their way to make it incredibly easy to migrate your entire mailbox to another service. Unlike Hotmail, that for years didn't allow blanket forwarding rules, the ability to check an essentially arbitrary number of POP3 accounts to pull from, and the ability to send mail from any domain, Google bent over backwards to just do what would make their service the best, even if that meant making it easier to lose them to competition. Google, from what I can tell, considers it a priority to set up their services so the incentives drive them to make the product better, not worse. With Google Drive, they don't even really need to do this, since there's very little stopping users from dragging their files over from their Google Drive into their Dropbox if they don't like it better. There's even multiple ways of integrating Dropbox with Gmail, many of which are free - some even provide drag and drop support.
Microsoft, on the other hand, continually goes out of it's way to do the 'dick move' to their consumers. With XBox 360, they went out of their way to make most USB storage devices work with the console, BUT intentionally placed a limit so you could only access the first 16GB of any device, forcing consumers to buy the XBox 360-specific hard drives if they wanted more than that amount of space. Microsoft doesn't apologize - they just say "yes, we went out of our way to intentionally inconvenience you because we think it will make more money in this case, and that's what we'll do every time."
Another great example is PDF support in Office. Historically, in Office Mac, they just had the option to save or print to PDF. In Windows, they just left this out for more than a decade, on purpose, until finally in 2006 they caved, probably under competitive pressure and their corporate consumers whining about it so much. As much as I think PDF is junk, you can't argue it wasn't a widely used format that they could have easily supported, and it wasn't Adobe stopping them. They intentionally did it just to be dicks - they had a reputation to uphold, after all.
Microsoft's version of Java - another move that just seemed to be made intentionally out of spite towards Java developers. They release a modified version of Java that isn't compatible, only to then abandon it once a bunch of Java developers migrated. It's hard not to think the whole thing was just a plan to fuck with people.