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Google's Insular Nature

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the hard-nut-to-crack dept.

stockpicker_dude_78 writes "Robert Cringley has written a thought-provoking article on Google's insular nature, and compares them to the similar environment at Microsoft." From the article: "Google is secretive. This started as a deliberate marketing mystique, but endures today more as a really annoying company habit. Google folks don't understand why the rest of us have a problem with this, but then Google folks aren't like you and me. The result of this secrecy and Google's 'almighty algorithm' mentality is that the company makes changes -- and mistakes -- without informing its customers or even doing all that much to correct the problems."

3 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. Oh noes! Google trys to make monies! by grammar+fascist · · Score: 5, Insightful

    From the article:

    Google attracts advertisers like Luis with the idea that their ads will be cheaper because, frankly, they are selling something that is only thinly traded. The dream is that the system scales and scales fairly, only it isn't fair at all because if Amazon wants to advertise an equation editor USING EXACTLY THE SAME AD TEXT AND FORMATTING AS LUIS -- their words will cost 100 times less than the same words bought by Luis. It's not that Amazon (or any other big Google advertiser) has better copy writers, it is just that they sell a broader range of things.

    "A large percentage of impressions & clicks do have £0.01 minimum bids," said Jeff from Google, "but these are our very highest quality ads/advertisers."

    In other words, the minimum word price is 1p, BUT NOT FOR YOU.

    Um, yeah. The same words should be more effective coming from Amazon than from Cringely's friend Luis, because people are simply more likely to click.

    You could run all this through an algorithm that maximizes expected revenue (AI people would call this "utility") for Google based on click probability, and you'd come up with pretty much what Google does.

    I'm sorry. I'm not a Google fanboi, but this is ridiculous.

    --
    I got my Linux laptop at System76.
  2. There's a reason Cringley is a 2bit writer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There's a reason Cringley has remained a mediocre journalist, while google is a multi-billion software firm founded on being really, really smart.

    This reason is exemplified by Cringley misunderstanding that google (and microsoft, and coke, and countless other hugely successful firms) are successful *solely* because they own trade secrets, leveraged into strategy -- and not because of some stupid "mystique" concept invented by mediocre journalists because they don't know what the company is actually doing, but still get paid by the word.

    Duh.

  3. Is that how you see it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Because it looks to me here more like what's happening here is just the "geek community" (by which, of course, I just mean "people who read slashdot") increasingly losing all touch with reality.

    You can see this happening in a number of ways, but the increasing process of demonizing Google more and more (to the exclusion of having much energy left over to care about corporate interests which are legitimately harming the public good) is just the funniest.

    You wanna know when Google got "evil"? It had nothing to do with China. Google got "evil" when they got successful. Self-proclaimed "geeks" got so used to rooting for the underdog that, pavlov style, as soon as Google became the overdog they started reflexively rooting against them.

    I was reading Slashdot on the day that Google went IPO; people were already predicting, before the IPO, that Google would no longer be able to keep up a perception of being "good" while a for-profit, publicly traded company. And then the next day, when Google went IPO, they went ahead and started perceiving Google as "evil", without going to the bother of waiting for Google to actually do anything evil. Once Google finally went and got around to starting up a search site hosted in China*, these people started using this retroactively as the justification for their loose anger against Google. People who weren't looking for a reason to demonize Google barely even noticed the whole China thing.

    * What, you think what Google did was "censoring search results"? The Chinese google search sites hosted in America and Taiwan aren't censored and still work just the same as they always did. It's just that now Google also has a local site hosted in China and adhering to China's censorship laws that people in China can use if they want unfettered access to Google without having to circumvent China's web filters every time they need to search for something. Is this an ethical thing for Google to do? Maybe, maybe not, with the balance probably being on "not". But by doing this, Google has hurt nobody; if Google hadn't done this, nobody would have been helped and all that would have happened is MSN would have become the default search engine in China. The only reason we view Google's presence in China as a problem is that we for whatever reason hold Google to the special standard that they shouldn't do business in China, a standard we do not hold Cisco, Yahoo, Microsoft, Fox News, CNN, McDonalds, or the U.S. Government to.

    How can you tell when the Slashdot userbase has lost all sense, logic, or integrity? When they start agreeing with Cringely.