Google's brand has plummeted since the era of blogger/google reader/google talk, etc.
It's just that they have powerful monopolies that fund pretty much anything they want to do and there are powerful network/lock-in effects for email, documents, calendars, chat, mobile app sales, etc and even YouTube.
You're free to join a different chat network but none of your friends are there. You can change to another calendar provider but you'll still have on in gmail and people will share things to it. You can upload your video to Vimeo, but it won't have anywhere near the ability to attract traffic as it would on YouTube and it probably won't do as well in search results. Feel free to write an app for non-Google Android users, but not many people will buy it or even encounter it (unless you're in a market like China and are on a local monopoly's platform).
Google has hurt their brand. They're just not that dependent on people liking them anymore. In a lot of ways it's like Microsoft was 20 years ago.
Yes it has. I've been burned by Google so many times that if they came out with $1000 flying cars tomorrow I'd say "Meh. I'll wait for Tesla to do it."
It definitely has, both for me personally and in my observation. The classic example is Google Keep. It was launched during while Google was killing off a number of other products and services. I don't know of any person who uses Google Keep for notes or to-do lists (of course, it helps that there are literally hundreds of other services that have superior functionality).
I think it has. People started to think twice about the switching costs before adopting a google service. The first question you hear whenever google starts a new cloud service is "how long is google going to offer this".
Those are questions that we need to ask of every service and vendor, especially free and low priced ones. If google has helped people recognize this then it's for the best.
