I just think it is fine to complain when something is changed to the worse and there are no good alternatives. What if you and a lot of people really liked bagels, and only one company made these, they might even have a patent on bagels. One day this company decides to use trans-fats in all their bagels. Would you tell the few people that discovered the change and started complaining that they should shut up and accept it or buy toasts instead? I'm not advocating for government intervention, but I think an active protest is fair when your options are limited.

I don't believe that a few resourceful users passively boycotting these products will do the best for the masses. It's like going to the supermarket, reading the declaration on some product and finding out that it's filled with chemicals. Should you accept that and either not buy the product, knowing that people not reading the declaration will be fed these chemicals, or should you speak up?

Chances are that if enough people make a fuzz about an annoying feature in a Google product, maybe they will change it in their effort of keeping their white hat on and the geek culture on their side.

I will probably install Google Earth anyway, but I just don't like the attitude that you should passively accept stuff that smells, when there are no good alternatives. That is not healthy competition. Going to the record store to buy the whole album and rip it is a real last century hassle when all I wanted to do was to play this particular song on my car's mp3 player.

This is a bit like saying that if you don't like DRM, then choose not to listen to music. Google makes some great product with a huge user base. All the common users might be annoyed by resource hungry background application without knowing why, but only the top 1% most tech savvy might be aware of the source of annoyance and choose to boycott Google. That will not put any pressure on Google.

Again, replace "install Google's software" with "download DRM music". I want to listen to music on all devices I own and I want to use Google's great products without screwing up my system. I don't think that the government is the way to go, but someone should tell Google that day are doing harm. I'm pretty tired of reinstalling Windows XP every other month because it clutters with this kind of background stuff.

Notifying previous voters would still most likely bias the result. First of all it would require the possibility to notify all voters and that all notified voters would reconsider their choice given the new options. Even if you could notify all voters and they all spent time voting again everytime a new option was introduced, they would probably be biased by seeing intermediate results. Having the voters somehow decide the poll options before opening the poll is a great idea, but changing a poll while it's running introduce bias.