I’ve been telling people for years to not use Google for anything mission-critical (or even just “important”). They have a long history of suddenly deprecating products / services with no migration strategy.

On the other hand, my iPhone 3GS is also useless. It still works — but no current popular app will run on it. Granted it’s a six year old device, but the fact remains that all of this modern proprietary tech eventually becomes useless.

The open hardware movement in the 80s revolutionized the personal computer market. We’ve taken a major step backwards with these new proprietary hardware/software/service combinations; consumers have forgotten the downside of proprietary.