How so? A world without Google would have shitty search initially but would exist perfectly fine. iOS/Windows, Safari/Firefox, Apple Maps, iCloud Mail/Outlook, Vimeo already exist and soon a decent search engine would surface.
There's an interesting article on Gizmodo (so please take it with a grain of salt) about trying to cut Google out of your life - long story short, it's surprisingly hard and some things you wouldn't expect will break.
YMMV. I mostly moved off Google for my own usage last year and deleted my paid Google Apps account (let’s ignore work usage as that’s out of my hands). Remaining services I use are YouTube (no competitor), books.google.com (occasionally, when Hathi is proving too slow) and groups.google.com (the project I mostly contribute to organises there). Of those three I could dump books.google.com without too much effort and I only interface with groups.google.com via email; moving to another provider would be totally possible if needed.
True enough. I found the things mentioned in the article interesting because you also lose things like Google Web Fonts and a number of services which depend on the Google Maps APIs for mapping.
Unfortunately, I won't be able to completely disconnect because I've got a number of friends who share photos through Google Photos (and I would like to keep access to those), a number of friends who only use Hangouts (not sure if that's better or worse than FB Messenger), and YouTube doesn't have any real competitors.
I'm guessing Tim Cook is not ready to give that up in the name of "fighting for privacy." Otherwise he'd have already made DuckDuckGo the default search engine.
There's no doubt in my mind Steve Jobs would've kicked Google out, but Tim Cook is much more of a bean counter to make such a move.
However penalizing/threatening a customer of Google Cloud for something totaly unrelated would open the road to an antitrust case as huge as Google leverage on current IT sector.
PS: On the otherside migrating all services out of Google Cloud would be a technical challenge (their needs are huge) but at the end of the day a minor annoyance for Apple.
