Holy heck... this could make Google Voice/Talk my client o' choice.

Yup, and odds are they will offer free VoiP.

If Gizmo5 was open, someone has the source code saved (and perhaps played around with it). That could be developed as XviD did when splitting off from DivX perhaps?

I always thought DivX preceded XviD... where the group (hacker group) Radius did the groundwork for DivX before it was rolled into an honest company.

Or something like that. This is going back to '98-'99 or so.

Yes, but from my understanding, the people who wanted to keep it free developed the XviD strand, while DivX attempted to go commercial.

anybody have an answer to the above quote?

I have to disagree a bit. Microsoft is the embodiment of evil in my opinion. What I saw Microsoft do time and time again in situations like this is instead of purchasing the startup company, they would steal the idea (and maybe even a key employee or two), develop their own version in house, and put the startup company out of business. Their own version would be inferior, of course. But their size and ruthlessness made it impossible for any startup to complete. This was purely a win-lose style of business. Microsoft would win and make sure that everyone else lost.

Google is more traditional in that they are not so blatantly cut-throat in the capitalistic ecosystem. When they purchase startups, that's win-win for the entrepreneurs and for Google.

Now, what Google does wth the information they have about us and how they respect our privacy is a different matter.

But in my book, Google is no where near as evil as Microsoft. We need a few companies to become gorillas to step on Microsoft and to open up an environment where entrepreneurs can start businesses with some hope of success. Back in Microsoft's heyday, they simply sucked all the blood out of every potentially competitive startup.

Just my 2 cents...

Yahoo? MSN/Bing? Altavista (do they still exist?)? Ask?

For email:
Hotmail/MSN, Yahoo, GMX, hushmail, fastmail, etc
or better yet, look here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari...mail_providers

and here for search engines:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines

Would using an anonymizer or proxy get around linking data to you for things like Google search?

Google Voice + Gizmo has become my telephony system of choice. I even recommended it to my mom and she uses it now too.

My commentary sits here; in short, pay attention to history.

I personally don't use any VoIP yet. Knowing the field, and the incoming LTE transition, I've been doing my homework on the different companies within VoIP, looking to see who has as solid enough base with which to use and be as seamless to my mobile(s) as possible. Gizmo5 has been in there; but sits on the side with the Google acquisition as I'd like to see what changes there.