Without these two I would not touch any of these services. They are, almost without a doubt, radioactive.

Why?

It's an old story, really: Get tangled with Google algo's for any reason and your account is suspended with no recourse. There goes everything: adsense, adwords, plus, gmail, drive, docs and whatever else was linked to that account.

No thanks. Make a real commitment to behave like a real business partner with me and my clients and you have a deal. Until then, thanks, but no, thanks.

Don't get me wrong, I would definitely like to use these services. I most definitely do. However, the risk of the totalitarian account suspension mechanism chopping your head off is just not worth my time.

Charge me $99 a year (think Apple). Put me through the vetting process that Apple puts you through when you register as a developer (company data, etc.). Get comfortable with the fact that I am a real business. Then, from that point forward, let's have a real business-to-business relationship as opposed to a totalitarian-government-to-insignificant-ant relationship. That's a winning formula.

This is not what "irreparable harm" used to mean. Apple's lawyers are celebrating tonight.

EDIT: If I plan to kill a cat, and you file a lawsuit to stop me, the judge may issue an injunction for me not to kill the cat until the lawsuit is complete. Humanity does not know how to unkill a cat, so if I did so while the lawsuit was pending, I would make the lawsuit moot and evade justice. That is "irreparable harm", at least if it's your cat.

On the other hand, if my actions are causing you mere monetary harm, we know exactly how to repair that: take money from me and give it to you. Injunctions should not be issued in such cases, because the plaintiff can always be made whole later on by simply receiving an appropriate amount of money.

Apple has managed to have a bogus patent issued - the patent, as far as I can tell, covers any sort of "search-as-you-type" system. Any sort. The Firefox awesome bar, Android search (every Android device that exists), Google Instant, any webpage with javascript autocomplete... you're all violating Apple's patent. And if Apple can find judges as friendly as Ms. Koh, all of these products can be taken off the market indefinitely.

And now they're grabbing up that stick and going to town with it.

You didn't own a website here. You didn't write code, you didn't set up servers, and you didn't sit around worrying about whether you were monetizing well enough to keep the site from imploding under its own popularity. You volunteered to be the curator of an entry in a database owned by a multi-billion-dollar company, you took an abnormal amount of pride in your work, and after a few years they decided your services were no longer needed.

You are owed nothing. Be more careful with how you invest your time from now on.

  1. Start centralized bitcoin depository.
  2. Fail to provide any loss protection.
  3. "get hacked"
  4. Profit.