I moved from Gmail to Fastmail recently, because Google Sites forced me to move from V1 to V2. However, in their defense, they gave me over a year's notice to convert my site and I still didn't do it. They made it read-only after a year, which is what pushed me into trying the migration. It was a disaster: the Google V2 site was slow (my release notes page took 15 seconds to load but used to load in a couple seconds) and the site looked like crap. So I had to do Takeout and hand-edit Google's 512KB-per-page of Javascript and HTML. But now, pages average 19KB each, the site looks great, and it's way easier to manage with Asciidoc instead of using a browser editing window.
My point: it doesn't matter how long they give us to switch - most people won't do it until they are absolutely forced.
This reminds me of Microsoft back in the day. Windows was (is?) crap, unreliable, and without the kindness of technical friends and relatives willing to work on someone's Windows issues for free, Microsoft may not have ever made it past DOS. I got sick of working on everyone's Windows problems so got rid of all my Windows machines and just told people "sorry, I don't have any Windows machines anymore and can't help you". And it was the truth - after about a year I really didn't know how to help them anymore! It's great!
Maybe it's time for technical people to stop working for free for Microsoft and Google. If their stuff is crap, let them sort it out with their wonderful customer service that you now have to pay for.
My point: it doesn't matter how long they give us to switch - most people won't do it until they are absolutely forced.
This reminds me of Microsoft back in the day. Windows was (is?) crap, unreliable, and without the kindness of technical friends and relatives willing to work on someone's Windows issues for free, Microsoft may not have ever made it past DOS. I got sick of working on everyone's Windows problems so got rid of all my Windows machines and just told people "sorry, I don't have any Windows machines anymore and can't help you". And it was the truth - after about a year I really didn't know how to help them anymore! It's great!
Maybe it's time for technical people to stop working for free for Microsoft and Google. If their stuff is crap, let them sort it out with their wonderful customer service that you now have to pay for.