Is Google Evil?
Google are at the forefront of cloud based services on the internet and according to Wikipedia had 193.3 million Gmail users in November of 2010. If you’re one of those 193.3 million recipients of that free service it’s easy to see the good side of what Google has done in the marketplace. Before they arrived a local ISP was trying to charge end users a small fortune just for a reasonable sized email box.
I don’t know about you, but whenever something is ‘free’ I have a niggling doubt. A little voice reminding me delivering the service certainly isn’t free of costs, 193 million 7 gigabyte mailboxes have to be put somewhere and the network required to service all those people is substantial. So where does the money come from?
The answer is, of course, that bane of TV watchers everywhere, the billboard blight of motorways - advertising.
Our poor old IT industry doesn’t know much about advertising, aside from it being a mysterious black hole in which to pour money. We certainly never dreamed there was any way to get rich doing it. All our money came from a slush fund we called the marketing budget. We thought advertising meant a free tee shirt. Until Google came along.
What got me thinking about this was the way Google looses email every so often. I thought to myself, how can anyone treat their customers that way? And then it dawned on me like the elephant in the room winking at me. We aren’t the customer anymore. Remember that the service is free, or even for business very cheap, and Google’s customer is the advertiser. Stop and listen to the penny drop because that’s a huge sentence.
I’m convinced this is a big part of the future. Cloud services are mostly driven by price so the guy who gets a good income from advertisers can discount the price to consumers of the service. It’s the Google way and anyone who don’t follow that model are at a huge cost disadvantage. It seems inevitable cloud based service must become laden with advertising of all kinds, advert popups and all your information sold to the highest bidder. No wonder Eric Schmidt was out selling the idea privacy doesn’t exist anymore, because if it does his income stream will be smaller.
Many traditional product companies have readily climbed onboard the cloud-train. At first glance it seems like mana from heaven, they simply approach an existing customer who has already paid once for licensing and ask them to pay a second time to rent the same service on a long contract. Sounds too good to be true? What they may not have thought through is where this train is headed. If an advertiser is prepared to pay more than a licensee the licensing is becoming worthless or at least substantially devalued. But that licensing is the capital of the software company, the crown jewels of intellectual property, the mojo. Advertising trumps engineering.
Another concern I have is the total lack of consumer (not customer) focus this creates. Google lose a few thousand emails - who cares. It’s not like they offended any of their customers. What this means is the software development focus has changed to delivering the best product experience to you the consumer into delivering the best commercial experience for the advertising customer. I can’t see how product quality won’t slump.
Google isn’t evil, it’s advertising. Maybe advertising is evil but that’s a different question.
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