
The Race For Lock-in: Google+ and Facebook - jmarbach
http://blog.ingenic.com/the-race-for-lock-in-google-and-facebook
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donaq
_Google has lock-in with search, and Facebook has lock-in with social
networking_

Argh, how does Google have lock-in with search? The minute Google stops
delivering relevant results, you can switch search engines with practically no
cost.

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cj
" _The minute Google stops delivering relevant results_ "

That's the thing. Amazon has a better product search, IMDB has better movie
search, and StackOverflow has better results for technical question. Google
doesn't necessarily provide the best results for all queries, but people still
use it because it's easy, even though it's not the best.

In that way, Google has lock-in with search.

~~~
cageface
Generality and lock-in are two completely different things. I can do exactly
what you describe just as easily with Bing.

~~~
jmarbach
With the addition of products such as Google+, Google is aiming to secure on
their lock-in by harnessing more personal data about you. Besides Facebook,
Google provides the most personally relevant results. As long as you continue
to log-in to Google services, Google will have a lock-in on personally
relevant search.

~~~
rmrm
That is not lock-in, in and of itself. It is valuable data (for both Google
and yourself), but it isn't lock in. Getting your data back out in a way that
is useful to someone else, making my history portable is what mitigates lock-
in. Lack of portability and exchangeability of things _you_ own, not the
usefulness of a service, is the hallmark of vendor lock-in.

I can actually get my web history on Google, Google provides an XML feed of
searches I could take and give to someone else if I wanted to -- but it only
covers a 1 month snapshot. It has the term I searched for, and the link I
clicked on. That is a pretty good corpus of information about me. Google could
provide _all_ of my web history, that would be a very positive sign of non
lock-in behavior. Maybe they do somewhere, but I don't see it on the DLF page.
So I agree with you that they could do more.

But I disagree with your apparent reasoning as to what lock-in actually means.

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vegardx
This has nothing to do with lock-ins, in it's proper meaning. You can't just
make up your own meaning on a word just to make your article ~interesting.

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macavity23
I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how Google operates. They
want to _prevent_ lock-in, lock-in by anybody, because if the information is
open, they can 'organize it and make it accessible and useful' (their mission
statement).

Take their two most successful non-search products, Android and Chrome. Both
of these are Open Source, and are explicitly positioned not directly to make
money for Google, but rather to offer a highly functional, feature-rich and
free product so that nobody else in the same market can try and lock consumers
into their product without looking lacklustre by comparison.

Thus far Chrome has been extremely successful in this regard, Android
moderately so - but that's Google's modus operandi throughout their business,
and there's no reason to suspect that Plus will be anything different.

They just want to make sure they can search it - they don't care who controls
it.

