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Google Begins To Merge Google+, Gmail Contacts
An anonymous reader writes "Google today announced new integration between Gmail and Google+ that sees your social connections show up in auto-complete when you're composing an email. Google says the feature is rolling out "over the next couple of days" to everyone that uses Gmail and Google+."
You aren't actually forced to use G+, even if it is enabled on your account. Realistically, Google won't be able to force you to use G+ either since that would break interoperability with other email providers.
As for the privacy concerns associated with G+, they should exist whether or not these are independent services. It is the same company collecting your data after all.
Desktop operating systems: BeOS, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD MacOS.
By your reasoning Microsoft never had a monopoly to leverage either. Take your double standard and cram it. "Monopoly" in the context of anti-trust and anti-competition laws means "dominant market position",
Microsoft had a >85% share of the desktop market, and this is a point Federal Investigators made at the time they were considering bringing charges against Microsoft. None of those competing operating systems, taken together, had anywhere near enough market share to disrupt Microsoft effectively targeting Netscape and nearly putting them out of business. The E.U. agreed with this assessment, and brought similar charges to those brought by the DOJ in the U.S..
This is a matter of historical fact and court record.
Google has a dominant market position in search, webmail and web video, Microsoft has/had a dominant position in desktop operating systems.
Apparently you don't understand what wielding monopolistic power means either, but lever let details stop you from getting your frothing at the mouth on.
Say we grant your premise for the sake of argument. What services is Google forcing you to use, in place of what other services, by leveraging their dominant position? The only thing they are doing is using G+ as the primary placeholder for their combined credentials store, and even then, unless you are creating a new YouTube account, you can choose not to attach your existing YouTube account to the G+ credential.
The only thing that they are doing, which I think is kind of piss-poor on their part, but has nothing to do with the use of monopolistic power in any way, is preventing you creating *new* separate accounts for their various services, the same way you are unable to create separate accounts for Word or Excel on the Office365 site.
From a services management perspective, maintaining multiple back end account databases is a PITA, so I can understand why they are doing this, although I really hate that they are doing the whole Facebook-like thing and insisting on "Real Identities or well known pseudonyms", and denying account creation outside those categories. I think anonymity is important, but you aren't going to resolve that particular issue by having separate accounts, since giving that up is pretty much part of their TOS agreement, just as it's becoming part of everyone else's.