Google, ‘Free Services’, and The Cost of Free
I cannot actually remember the first time I ever ‘Googled’ something. For many years my search engine of choice was Dogpile (which likely really dates me!) because it stacked together the results from all other search engines.
That was still a necessary thing at the turn of the century… What I can remember though is the day when I discovered I could install the Google Toolbar into Internet Explorer 7. Gone were those wasted seconds of navigating to a new tab! I also know at some point I signed up early enough for a Gmail account that I did not need to append my name with ‘-247’. Back then it was just a pure email service, none of this vast ecosystem you very suddenly become a part of because you filled out a few textboxes.
Essentially, I have been down with Google for a long time now. I experienced the early Android days when you could comfortably scroll through all the apps in what was then called the Android Market. I have bought and used various products and services which now find themselves becoming just another listing in the Google Graveyard. I even once briefly used the ‘Facebook defeater’ Google+.
My point is that having stuck with the guys from Mountain View for almost 2 decades now, if even I am finding points of frustration, then something must definitely be up!
So what has finally got me hitting the point of annoyance? It is not the sense of abandonment some of my colleagues' have, with the death of Stadia wrecking their gaming time. What has finally pushed me over the edge is the continued and, what seems deliberate, half-heartedness with their ‘free’ products.
Most of us are likely heavy users of Google’s free stuff. I am writing this very blog in their homage to (read: feature lite) MS Word. I use Maps in my car, Calendar for my diary and store all my life reminders in Keep. So if you are like me there is a good chance you are used to repeatedly coming up against the lack of polish so much of their ‘free’ stuff now has.
I feel like I could give a number of examples but I will focus on the one that is daily frustrating. At some point (probably to my wife's consternation) I decided to go all in smart lighting and Google nest speakers. Basically every room in our house has one or more smart lights and a little Nest Mini tucked away somewhere. That means we can play the same bit of music in every room of the house and tweak the lights to exactly the tone and brightness we are after. But doing that can be relentlessly fiddly! Some engineer at Google seems to have decided you can have 1 of 2 annoying configuration options:
You leave ‘Continued Conversation’ on and every time you tell it to turn on a light you have to motion to everyone in the room to stay silent or the Google lady will start shouting all kind of randomness at you from the snippet of chat it heard
You repeatedly badger Google with (brand name included) key phrases so you can have just the 2 of 3 lights on you want at the brightness and colour you need, all the while regretting not just using the app on your phone
My other daily annoyance is how often I ask it to “turn on Study light” and then get duly informed it couldn’t turn on the Study Chromecast and I should speak to the manufacturer. The thing is Google, I quite clearly didn’t say anything about the Chromecast and you, it turns out, are the manufacturer?
This probably all seems (and is) very much the definition of a first world problem but I feel it is fairly reasonable that if you are going to sell all these products to me via your ‘Smart Home’ category on your webpage you could at least train it to understand the word ‘And’!
I do have a reason for banging on about all this and not just to let off the steam that’s been bubbling away in my head for months now. I am sure you will have noticed I kept calling all these Google services ‘free’ above. Sure we don’t actually pay anything (for now…) to have Google respond to all our many demands but we all know why that is. They’re mining invaluable data out of us every single second we use their services. They make billions of $’s every year by using that data to run their real business, advertising. Life may be a little easier for us with Google Maps to get around but the real beneficiaries of all these free services are our Google Overlords.
My point is that we need to stop being so content with the quality of features all these ‘free’ data driven IT services provide. Just because we are not handing over cold hard cash it doesn’t mean we are not giving them anything useful and that they shouldn’t care about the kind of user experience we are getting. We are giving them data, which is now the world’s most valuable resource, and it seems quite reasonable to expect our ‘smart’ apps and devices to be just that!
