An article was forwarded to me about Alexa (part of Amazon) dumping Google.
Google’s roots are in indexing other site’s content. They did that really well, but the content belonged to others. You could quibble about whether the Google Cache was Google’s taking of content, but most users liked the feature for perf and out-of-date reasons, so it’s a bit different.
Going beyond search, Google is now showing clear steps that not only do they want to index the data, but they want the content too. Google Base is the biggest example of that. I’m not sure why Google Base even wants the content. Seems like a liability to me. But they do, so far. And Google Base is probably about the smallest of the Google services.
Google services that want to own your content include gmail, google talk, froogle, google base, picasa, google calendar, blogger, etc.
I’m not sure if this really leads to major players shifting away from Google, but it might. It certainly may end up “restoring balance to the force”.