Does Google believe that if they just push a little harder and finish the job, that somehow the people so alienated will be won over?
Or is the pursuit of profit far more important than the perception of the brand overall?
Right now, and for the last year, the brand is being severely tarnished in all of the networks I have, tech and real-life. I don't see them winning on any front. A Pyrrhic victory.
I have no idea why people talk about huge corporations like they have hive mind and are in total unity?
Google is now a mega-corp, comprised of thousands competing for finite success outcomes (raises & promos). It is also data driven hence they look at metrics that are considered success like registers over abandonments. Brand tarnish is a long term outcome, therefore it can not be seen in typical a/b testing cycles. Hence it is ignored, or even gamed upon for short term metric gain.
This is true for all corps that equate success with short cycle data driven metrics.
> I have no idea why people talk about huge corporations like they have hive mind and are in total unity ?
Because despite being a mega-corp, comprised of thousands [...], it's still called and named `Google`, singular. They naturally map it to one entity ; not because they are stupid but because the entity is interacting with them solely through that one identity and they don't have incentives to care for the inner workings of that entity.
> It is also data driven hence they look at metrics that are considered success like registers over abandonments. Brand tarnish is a long term outcome, therefore it can not be seen in typical a/b testing cycles. Hence it is ignored, or even gamed upon for short term metric gain. This is true for all corps that equate success with short cycle data driven metrics.
Like: "we don't care about those abandonments because we got these phone numbers which are more valuable and show we are a trusty brand" ? Makes sens (no sarcasm).
They don't care about abandonment because anyone can game A/B testing.
Users are easily persuaded. A majority of users will give in just so the damn thing shuts up. They probably use the metrics to hand out bonuses or engage in pointless contests leading to gamification.
It doesn't take a village to make a Picasso, and any attempts to try are going to result in failure. Google needs leadership.
Either your description of a purely data driven corporation is true, in which case I would say Google operates exactly like a hive mind, or something else is controlling these actions. Actions which across all Google properties are identical in nature, and maybe more significantly, tone of voice.
That, or all of this is just a huge coincidence. I find that to be the least plausible explanation.
Clearly this is a unified strategic approach. It's one Google doing this, not dozens of units that happen to accidentally all try to do the same things the same way at the same time. It's the total unity part that actually makes it more creepy.
That a bad plan comes from a famous person doesn't make it any less of a bad plan.
In the spirit of Google: +1 for people and +2 for companies now actively moving away from almost all Google properties because they're becoming so unpleasant and/or unproductive to use. I know they're all about being data driven and running empirical tests: that's why the {expletive deleted} page moves around every time I come back and visit something, which is probably the single most annoying thing they've been lately. The very fact that they're running so many tests is materially reducing the value of their services to us.
Ironically, our exodus started with abandoning our business G+ pages, because they have generated so little interest that they aren't even worth a few minutes now and then to update them any more. It appears that literally no-one we care about is actually using Google+.
> That a bad plan comes from a famous person doesn't make it any less of a bad plan.
But I didn't say that the plan was a good one (or a bad one), just that this action and similar ones do seem to be in accord with that top-down plan rather than the result of independent action by lower-level people.
I'm merely offering an anecdotal view and make no claim otherwise, though FWIW it's a pattern I've now seen with multiple clients who previously had varying levels of Google dependence as well as my own companies and myself personally.
The thing that made me mention it was that so many of the reasons given by so many of the people involved are fundamentally the same. If what I've seen is at all representative, Google are increasingly perceived to be a security/privacy risk (though this is hardly unique among cloud services) and perhaps worse for them, they're not perceived to be a stable long-term bet (too many dropped products, too many unwanted changes happening too fast, nothing special in terms of quality or features, and little support for users).
Some of these factors presumably won't be as damaging to Google in the consumer market, or at least not as quickly, so I don't see their main advertising business dying any time soon. However, to businesses with real money on the line and organisation-wide IT strategies to plan, Google's overall offering looks increasingly unattractive. For example, Google Docs/Drive/Apps have been tried by various groups I know. None is still happy with them, and several have been forced to move at least some of their activities to alternative systems because the Google ones just weren't capable of getting those jobs done. Chrome is another example I've more often heard mentioned between curse words than flattering ones recently. And I already mentioned in another post the horrible experience we had trying to organise some Google Ads.
Google's resilience appears to stem in part from traditional alternatives shooting themselves in the foot by also pushing to cloud-based offerings and therefore immediately running into similar concerns. Even so, Google seem to be getting worse faster than everyone else.
Another anecdote here, but I jumped the GOOG ship long ago and apart from a very minor bump (adjusting to DDG) it was painless too. Sure, for a couple of days when I was unhappy with results I went back to Google, but they were no better. And sure, some Gmail features are great. But on the whole, they're not irreplaceable, and I reckon they need to take better care of their customers than they currently are.
I've got little more than anecdata to contribute as well.
Personally, I make use of some Google products but have been very consciously trying to shift away from them. Too much data, too long a retention period, and too obvious a target for snoops (ours, theirs, black hats). I'm increasingly uncomfortable with the prospect.
A few years ago, now, I was at a conference largely serving NGOs and the question of cloud computing came up. The idea was fairly novel then, and I expected the discussion to focus on technical aspects -- "how do we move our services to the cloud" type questions. Nuh uh.
It was virtually all about privacy, data control, jurisdictional control, and other legal issues, as well as some discussion of lock-in and similar issues. Now, I think of these things, and they come up on a corporate context, but for these people, many of whom deal with refugees, undocumented aliens, whistleblowers, and others basically in fear for their livelihoods if not their lives, these were all very, very real issues. And this was years before Snowden's disclosures.
Mind, I've followed online privacy issues for a few decades (and butt heads regularly with Lauren Weinstein on G+ over how significant Snowden's leaks were -- I say they're tremendous, he generally claims otherwise), but this level of direct awareness and concern in a largely non-technical audience was eye-opening.
For myself:
I decided to check out G+ and have stayed with it (though I quickly deleted my Real Name account). It has mostly not been particularly useful ... until early in 2013 where I found that rather than commenting about G+, I was actually using it to engage on other topics. I still see it as flawed (and quite possibly fatally so) in conception, but the technical underpinnings are very solid: the back-ends are fast, stable, and highly reliable, and even with rapid and continuous development the site rarely if ever breaks.
Utility-wise it's been another story. The DOM is so bloated I can rarely keep more than a tab or three open (and constantly have to re-kill those to reclaim RAM), the interface is atrocious, the underlying data and interactions models are utterly broken, and more (I've posted long rants many times, they're on my G+ profile, and I'm really beyond caring now). I went to the extent of very extensively modifying the UI through a monster (nearly 2000 lines) CSS stylesheet fixing endless annoyances (to be fair, I do this to many sites, HN included, but none is as extensive as G+). Adding joy to this is Google's obfuscated CSS (it's run through some sort of minimizer) which does wholesale class renaming periodically.
But other than G+ I've been trying to cut Google out. I set DDG as my search engine, returning to Google for a while before committing again this past June. The results are actually quite good, and though I return to Google occasionally, the bulk of my search is DDG.
I've got an Android device tied to Google as well, which I'd very much like to replace with something independent of it.
I make use of a few other services, though mostly not logged in.
And it's not that Google doesn't provide utility. I just have very serious problems with it (or anyone else) watching every breath I take.
Do you have any specific references to those accounts?
The consistency and duration of the push certainly makes it appear to me to be a top management directive. Which is among the reasons my faith and trust in the company has fallen so drastically as I've watched its G+ offerings evolve.
Sure its a mega-corp but some person or persons are in charge. And this individuals either agree with this path or are getting ready to fire some folks.
> I have no idea why people talk about huge corporations like they have hive mind and are in total unity?
Am I the only one to find this statement ironic?
One of the biggest arguments against Google+ and its drive to one account/real names is that individual people don't have unitary identities, let alone companies.
Maybe as a general assessment, but I think the google+/youtube merger specifically is being driven by ideology, not metrics. Remember that memo Steve Yegge wrote a few years ago? I think the company took that message very seriously. Maybe a little too seriously...
I don't see the connection though. Yegge was lamenting Google's unwillingness to be serious about being a platform company for third-party app developers (, developers, developers, developers ...) The latest changes don't seem to have much to do with progress on that front.
I didn't say they understood it correctly. The way I see it is that they read it and decided to act on it by making Google+ their core platform and giving it the killer app that it had been lacking - youtube. Opening up their platform for others might come later. Or maybe they forgot about it. Who knows?
This is true of all partner+ or close to partner level management due to that they are there for the long haul. They do not have metrics only ideology.
In the long haul, brand collapse will be seen; see MS where it has trickled from the bottom to the top, hence the exiting CEO and exec shedding.
But who is implementing and setting all the short term 'features', lower mgmt and ICs. The issue is that ideology is not enough for measuring success in mega corps, data has to used. The translation form ideology to metrics is where they fail.
Now that I'm re-reading this, it seems to me that Google is doing exactly the opposite. It's even more product focused, and is now moving towards making everything one big product called Google+.
There's no platform here at all. Not externally (who develops for or on Google as a platform?), but apparently not internally either.
Because the haphazard way in which different properties interact, the way functionality and data bleeds through, and all the damn bugs because of it are all signs of products and data being hooked up to each other with duct-tape.
I'm not asking for myself as much as the community. Linking to things you reference to helps multiple people & makes the thread, site and your comments all that more valuable.
And not linking certain things helps people more by helping distinguish between which references are particular enough to merit linking when mentioned and which can be assumed as common knowledge.
I've been loyal to Google's products, across the board, for over a decade.
They push another inch forward in terms of trying to force me to cross-link products or use something I don't want to, and I'm going to abandon their entire product suite, permanently.
I'm just one consumer, but that's how I'm going to vote, with my feet heading out the door. I don't like being abused in exchange for my decade of loyalty. Fortunately it's really trivial to switch off of Google for about 95% of what I use them for.
Completely agree. Google needs to pay attention, it isn't just some haters complaining about the top dog anymore. The backlash is coming from even long time fanboys.
There is nothing magical about being the customer. Paying money doesn't stop anyone from creating a multi sided market that makes you the product. As anyone who subscribed to a magazine, purchased season tickets to a cultural organization, or seen an ad on an Xbox can attest.
Also, you created an account an hour after this article was posted just to type a banal cliche that we've all had to endure endlessly?
Also : I'm a customer of my isp. Not too happy about them at all. In fact, I'm a lot happier being Google's product (and I would argue that at least in a few instances this is not true).
Yes, it can. Where exactly are they going to go? Even the really few of us who care about it enough to stop using Google search, turning to duckduckgo, still need to go back to Google every once in a while, when DDG obviously doesn't cut it. The interwebs are filled with Google's advertising products, and the number of Gmail users who evangelically try to beat its interface into behaving well enough to be worth a fuck is almost outrageous.
We are still a good five or six years away from the point where Google would have to worry about alienating the users whose data they sell, and with the decreasing amount of Internet education most users get before starting to surf the web, the distance from that point is increasing. They thrive on the eternal September.
We are still a good five or six years away from the point where Google would have to worry about alienating the users whose data they sell
I imagine MySpace were saying something similar for a couple of years as Facebook started really taking off, and Yahoo probably thought no new search engines were a threat a year or two before Google arrived.
The Internet is a funny place. A lot of Internet users move in herds, which means a disruptive newcomer can grow very fast if the whole viral networking effect kicks in, but usually when that happens one or more established players must fall to create the space.
> I imagine MySpace were saying something similar for a couple of years as Facebook started really taking off, and Yahoo probably thought no new search engines were a threat a year or two before Google arrived.
On the other hand, MySpace was not hooked on so many and so important portions of one's Internet life, nor did they have the advertising upper hand that Google has.
It has been so long; I almost forgot the phrase "Eternal September." Keeping an eye on your internet privacy is a pain in the ass: I use DDG when I can, block most scripts and trackers, and keep an eye on my cookies, but it breaks some websites in non-obvious ways, and I'll have to do something else to deal with browser fingerprinting. As long as most people are easily productized, it just doesn't matter.
My browsing habits are pretty much along the same lines, but I expect it will become much harder to do so in the following years. Between the feature creep and the monetization of idiocy, I expect we will lose even more diversity than we already have; on the software side, privacy-enabling features will just slowly disappear, as a smaller and smaller proportion of people will have the technical prowess to even care about them, let alone use them.
As for the Eternal September... I used to think it had been just a momentary problem that led to the unfortunate demise of USENET. I am starting to wonder if it wasn't, in fact, a first symptom. Programmers from my generation ought to have been so happy to see this happening -- the WWW available to everyone, connecting everyone. If only it weren't for the wrong reasons. The taste of my dream turned out to be a lot more bitter.
In the middle term, it will probably come down to stone tools: blocking via /etc/hosts, filtering headers through proxies, etc. I'll re-learn it.
As for the Eternal September... I used to be able to talk to people on the internet, with threads, groups, and killfiles, using the software of my choice. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Don't forget that Internet is the new television. We've built empires of television channels (including all the commercial football clubs) for the only sake of planting advertising inside each other's homes.
With Internet, we've had our innocence time, with few advertising, relatively clever users and smart, responsible usages.
But Internet will become the new plaza for the populace, filled with orange blinking advertisers, awful designs that only lowerclass people can accept (think saving a file in Windows 8 or just... facebook), like supermarkets who swap alleys around just to make you walk in front of new products, like neon lights which look awful as they try to catch your attention. And websites will get bugs as they grow old, because margins will be shallow again. The story of any long cycle in economy - 2012 was the top of the curve.
Google can definitely afford to alienate the small percentage of its users who actually care about privacy. They alienated me to the point where I no longer use any Google products, and I hear the company is still pretty successful.
People say that, but these are just labels, and ultimately it doesn't make a difference. The thing that matters is who has power in the relationship. Look at heroin; users are customers, but those supplying the product hold the power. Or look at the music industry: musicians are the product, fans are the customers, and neither of them have much power.
We would be the customer, if they hadn't messed up their advertising management systems so much that we've given up trying to make them work. I don't do our on-line marketing, but I think we're up to something like 4x actual spend that they're offering in credit as they beg us to start advertising with them now.
Even Facebook's ad buy system is better than Google's current one, and being worse than Facebook's ad buy system is an achievement that I always assumed would require years of practice and a lot of natural talent.
Precisely. It's as though Google is the new network television. Advertisers pay to be delivered bits of your attention, and the network focuses on trying to keep your attention, and with a little data mining & demographics match you with the "best" advertisements.
And there's no indication that they're in danger of not having you, or a large number of close approximations of you.
Social networking is today's TV, that you must participate both as a way to spend your life and to not be alienated from all the other people in your lives that use and talk about social, or TV, or whatever the next thing will be.
Or is the pursuit of profit far more important than the perception of the brand overall?
Right now, and for the last year, the brand is being severely tarnished in all of the networks I have, tech and real-life. I don't see them winning on any front. A Pyrrhic victory.