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My interactions with Google products remind me of 90's Microsoft. They are so rich and so well protected by their de facto monopoly that they institutionally gi
by djyaz1200 2y ago
My interactions with Google products remind me of 90's Microsoft. They are so rich and so well protected by their de facto monopoly that they institutionally give no F**s.
Example: In 2024, I have to go into my AdWords account daily and prevent them from adding irrelevant search terms they decide I should use to eat up my PPC budget. At best, that's user-hostile, if not outright theft.
I pay openAI $20 a month as a user and another $2.5K for their API for our business, and if I could put a memo in the payments, it would be FGooG. I don't think OpenAI is any better, but I'm ready for some new flavor of corruption.
Google is eventually going to have to pay for decades of user-hostile behavior. They just aren't loved; there is no stored-up goodwill there, which means if someone else has a better mousetrap, they die. Programmatically letting companies bid against each other for their Yellow Pages listing clearly is the most lucrative business model in the history of the Earth, but let's see what's next.
- jcgrillo 2y agoOne major difference is the incentives indirection. Google's revenue comes from ads, not end-user software, whereas the Microsoft of the '90s was much more directly connected to their users. So I'm not sure which is worse for the user, but it seems like it could make Google's situation worse because the signals they get from their "users" aren't necessarily the highest priority. Up to a certain threshold, enragement is engagement which is a positive short term signal for an ads company, with potentially bad long term consequences.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]