There’s a widespread assumption that heavy use of Google products is unavoidable and that they’re always the “best”. That hasn’t been my experience.
I’m still very happy with DuckDuckGo for search, and Apple Maps has been no worse than Google Maps for me recently. My standard IMAP email host, FastMail, works great, and the spam filtering is nearly perfect since I’ve put MailRoute in front of it — I’ve heard it’s better than Gmail’s.
I’m in complete agreement. The only Google service I still use..FeedBurner and Voice because there simply are no alternatives that are affordable.