Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room
The conflict of interest that is Google
J-Mac:
Another example of the erosion of basic freedoms in in how current legislation is on the table to make it illegal for US residents to grow food or use seeds that their gardens produce.
You pretty much need to be brain-dead to not understand that making it illegal for people to grow food is bad. But that is what is happening right now...
-Renegade (November 19, 2010, 11:51 PM)
--- End quote ---
I just read the proposed Senate bill and I cannot find any language at all that would forbid private gardens or forbid people to grow their own food. The thought is laughable!
I did notice that the site you linked to does not have any links at all to the bill itself; only to their own rants and the rants of like-minded sites. What is that site - a radical activist gardening site? ;D
Pure silliness!
Jim
mouser:
Oshyan, you always make good reasonable points. And I know I am really hard on Google when relatively speaking they are probably one of the best behaving large companies out there. And I don't think big necessarily means bad, it's just that when you have a giant corporation that goes public, the forces driving them to exploit avenues of maximizing revenue at the cost of ethical compromises become almost unstoppable. Google may be one of the better companies currently in terms of ethics, but I suppose I get on their case more because they are so incredibly determined to get their hooks into every crevice of the internet and push their own alternatives to almost every service one can imagine.
I guess have a natural resistance and suspicion of any company that is so determined to spreading out into every possible area they can, using their weight, publicity, and ability to simply give away services and lose money on them in order to gain more market share in the short term until the competitors are forced out.
Of course it's not just google.. It feels to me sometimes that the entire internet is working with a business model that looks like this:
* 1. First raise enough money so that you can afford to give away your service for free and do carpet bombing marketing until you kill the competition,
* 2. Then change what you are doing so you can profit off of the users once you have captured them in a system that makes it unlikely they will ever leave.
To me, that's a really nasty system, and I feel like it's starting to describe more and more of the internet. By it's nature it means that anyone who is actually focused on providing a reasonable service for a reasonable fee will lose to the big company with big pockets who can just come in and give away everything for free UNTIL they run the little guy out of business, at which point the hammer has to eventually drop. And meanwhile in the short term everyone is jumping up and down saying how happy they are that they are getting all this free stuff.
But of course you are right that we need to not fall into this trap of reflexively treating financial success and expansion negatively. Google does so many things so well, they deserve much of the praise they get, and they have earned much of their success. I think some of the anti-google sentiment you see growing is sort of a natural result of google continuing to acquire huge dominance in so many different market areas and continuing to get Apple-level fetishistic coverage from the press, which creates this kind of distortion field of reality that makes it hard to judge things neutrally. When that happens you lose some objectivity, and you end up with camps that are simply brand loyal for no rational reason, and camps that are against the brand just because they think it's not healthy for one company to own so much.
cmpm:
The point of such legislation is the 'seeds'.
This is being done to protect the original seeds of food by those who own them.
It's a big subject,
that has a lot of info,
you get hybrids or 'children' of any seeds you buy in a store.
Not the pure original seeds.
J-Mac:
mouser,
This entire thread in a way sounds like WalMart and the loss of smaller, Mom & Pop stores. I know that WalMart has been blasted - in many cases without valid cause - for the way they come into a market and plan out how they will drive local retail establishments out of business before they start creeping the prices up. Very similar to what you are saying about Google's tactics.
Thank you.
Jim
mouser:
It's really a fascinating exercise to try to map what happens on the internet to what the analogy would look like in terms of "real world" stores.
This has nothing to do specifically with google, but all web services.
Let's try a thought experiment:
Imagine the next time you go out to do some shopping, you go to your favorite shopping mall, and next to your normal grocery store is a new food store, where all the food is high quality and completely free. Wow! No more paying for food, now that's cool. While you are picking up your free food you are seeing lots of ads for some new shoe shops down the road offering free shoes for all, and a new bookstore offering the latest books for free. What a great day this is.. On your way home you pick up some great new shoes and some great new books. What a terrific day this is turning out to be -- everything is free.
Your shoes have these tiny adverts advertising the new free bookstore and free food store, and vice versa, but the ads are tiny and the stuff is free, so who cares.
The tv has news stories every night about these amazing new stores by brand X where you can get free food, shoes, clothes, cars, etc. They are all the rage and no one will even consider paying for food or clothes or cars or books anymore -- why would they? that would be like throwing money in the toilet.
This continues for months and you can't help but wonder.. who the hell is paying for all of this free stuff? But still, why ask too many questions, after all you are getting all this great stuff for free. All of the other stores go out of business and your neighborhood is now populated only with the free stuff stores from brand X. They have nice people working in them, nice clean stores, and everything is free.. what's not to love!
Of course it turns out that these companies are losing tons and tons of money on all this free stuff they are giving away.. but they are succeeding in killing off all their competition which doesn't have the money to lose hand over fist day after day, and who don't have the marketing dollars to capture your attention. In the back of your mind you know that the companies running these stores and losing all this money *MUST* have some kind of plan to start making a profit at some point, or must be making their money from something else you don't see, but you can't quite figure out what the plan is.
That's kind of where we are on the internet... And the answer to the million dollar question about what the "plan" is to profit at the end of it seems to be something along the lines of "it doesn't matter what the plan is, because if you can succeed in capturing such a huge marketshare, you gain these incredible monopolistic-effect benefits that come from the momentum of having such a huge userbase that you can market to and keep in place. And once you have such a userbase locked in (whether you are facebook, microsoft, google, or whatever), your possibilities for inserting new mechanisms for profiting from them are immense, and the possibility of a competitor stealing away customers is drastically reduced.
---
The idea of lock-in is not new, what's fascinating about google SEARCH is that unlike facebook and microsoft and other google services, it's hard to lock someone in to a search engine, because they can pretty easily switch to using a different search provider.. Which i think helps explain why google is so aggressive about cross-marketing all of their other products and pushing their own browser, to help them ensure they can keep nudging you to their search engine and other services and keep you in the google "network".
I think one way to think about this kind of stuff is that these companies (google, etc) have a very small isolated area of their universe where they make immense profits (or plan to make profits in the future once they have secured their userbase).. and then they build this entire infrastructure of other sites and services and marketing and free stuff in order to herd you into that one isolated area. And for many of us this kind of indirect system rubs us the wrong way, and the more indirection the more uncomfortable we get.
Regarding this indirection approach to profit making, I find it irritating and frustrating wherever I see it, and the bigger the company the more you seem to see it. Think about banks and credit card companies, they are always setting up these complicated convoluted systems and plans with unpredictable fees and penalties, and rewards and free toasters and random montly winners, etc. Just tell me how much it's going to cost to deliver the service i need and let's keep it simple, i don't want to play this game.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version