I haven't seen any of this stuff you're talking about, but now I'll look for it.
Small businesses (up to 10 people) used to get Google Apps for free, which has now been cancelled:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...826571350.html
It was actually used a lot by individuals to manage their own domains. Existing users get to keep it, at least, but it's still a shame.
Google ActiveSync is going to go away for all non-paid accounts (including individual accounts) at the end of January:
http://arstechnica.com/information-t...ree-customers/
This means you'll continue to get push notification to Android devices, but everything else will instead only get updates as they sync. That's an issue for those using a desktop email client.
Google voice is quite frankly, crazy to provide for free.
The reason they do it is because they use voicemails to train their voice recognition software. I have no problem with that, of course, and I'm a big fan of GV myself. But it's definitely not charity.
It has substantially increased my quality of life and their minutes to foreign countries are just dirt cheap, far cheaper than any other provider.
Depends on your usage, I think. Skype offers unlimited international calls for $10/month. Calling over data instead of voice does mean worse quality, though, unless you're calling from your computer.
I figured google play was fucked because google generally is not in the retail business.
Sure, but they've had some experience with it by now and should probably be able to do better...
The Google Books scale down I have no source for - that's just what I heard from librarians that work with Google. My guess would be that google books was used to train an algorithm and maybe they no longer need that (and now need to train it only on speech and images).
For what it's worth, I don't dislike Google. But for a long time now they've been well ahead of the pack. They may start to slip... if you have an @outlook account, the web interface really beats Gmail (except that it doesn't have the conversation view, I believe). Some major revamping might be overdue...