Ever used email before GMail?
Ever had one of those in-dash or on-window outdated GPS units that cost a pretty penny to keep current?
Ever had online storage and file transfer/sharing before Google Drive?
Ever searched before Google itself presented their search engine?
Ever had a "smart"phone before Android?
They may suck now with the increased enshittification of services… before they came along the web was a very rough place. And expensive as hell. Don’t discredit Google because you weren’t around to see how they improved things. Before it became about appeasing the stockholders, what Google bringing to the web was a -really- exciting time. Getting 1GB (and an ever increasing quota) for free webmail was fucking astounding, absolutely unheard of… and that was with the best spam filtering anyone had ever seen. Now everything that wasn’t done before Google did it is taken for granted.
That said. I have to admit there’s a sense of sadness within me when it comes to all of this. Google HAS gotten worse. And it’s compounded by the fact that I remember how much better they used to be. Now I’ve come to have to accept that I’ll be retiring my (singledictionaryword)@gmail address and start using Google services less. I’ll still be using Android, but exclusively third party roms and without dependence on GApps as default… and knowing that it has come to this fucking sucks.
1999-2009-ish was a fun time online. Endless possibilities. Google was a big part of that.
I hate, hate, hate that you’re making me defend Google here, but they’re the only smartphone, desktop/laptop oem that open source their os. They open source the browser, arguably their most important software. They continue to release their code under open licenses. Now compare this to how Microsoft was (and still is) in the 90s when Google started coming into prominence.
“Don’t be evil” was a direct response to companies like them.
Too often people comment as if the last five years of their experience with a company is all they need to know when remarking about something that was coined over twenty years ago. Context matters.