"They will have also made us totally dependent on Google services in such a way that we'll never, ever, be able to extricate ourselves." -- Robert X. Cringely
"One of our core philosophies at Google is we don't want our users' data ever to be held hostage, We want them to be able to take their data and do whatever it is they want to do with it. In the case of e-mail, that means taking their contacts to various devices, accessing their e-mail from any device or any e-mail client that they choose." -- Keith Coleman, Gmail product manager Danny: "And if you expand, how do you keep people not feeling like they should just fear you, that you're too far into everything?" Eric: "... With respect to discussion of fear and so forth, we've talked a lot about the limits to our growth and issues. The most obvious one is that we are literally one search click away from you going to our competitors. So if we do something that makes no sense to you as an end user, we have no way of preventing you from moving your information. We've also adopted a set of policies which we think are very Internet-friendly where we're not going to keep people's data hostage. We're going to allow them to, if they become dissatisfied with us, to move [their data]. So we're trying to address this question that you ask from the standpoint of how do we solve the end user's problem and keep them happy, give them choices" -- Search Engine Strategies Conference, Conversation with Eric Schmidt hosted by Danny Sullivan
