> Google on the other hand, is offering services without any lock-in or bundling.
There isn't lock-in, but they do seem to be trying for the bundling, where they're jump-starting a new product (that people may or may not want) by trying to tie it to existing popular products, not entirely in an opt-in manner. It'll be interesting to see how exactly the process plays out; they do appear to be aware of the potential for backlash if they're too strong-armed about forcing Blogger and Picasa users into Google+, but they also seem pretty interested in strongly nudging them towards it.
Looming further on the horizon, it'll be interesting to see whether they try to integrate Google+ and the similarly-named "Google +1" more closely, as a way of getting Google+ into search (their big dominant-market-share product that's an obvious candidate for bundling, at least if antitrust regulators don't get upset). The +1 product much more overtly tries to leverage search; e.g. it's on search results by default now, and information about how it affects search results is on the Webmaster Tools console.
There isn't lock-in, but they do seem to be trying for the bundling, where they're jump-starting a new product (that people may or may not want) by trying to tie it to existing popular products, not entirely in an opt-in manner. It'll be interesting to see how exactly the process plays out; they do appear to be aware of the potential for backlash if they're too strong-armed about forcing Blogger and Picasa users into Google+, but they also seem pretty interested in strongly nudging them towards it.
Looming further on the horizon, it'll be interesting to see whether they try to integrate Google+ and the similarly-named "Google +1" more closely, as a way of getting Google+ into search (their big dominant-market-share product that's an obvious candidate for bundling, at least if antitrust regulators don't get upset). The +1 product much more overtly tries to leverage search; e.g. it's on search results by default now, and information about how it affects search results is on the Webmaster Tools console.