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Going All-Google To Replace Your PC and TV Service

Posted by Unknown on from the owning-things-is-so-90s dept.

GMGruman writes "James Curnow writes 'Google's vision of computing involves tossing your PC or Mac and moving to a cloud-centric, all-Google ecosystem. Call it the Googleplex: a mix of the Chrome OS-based Chromebox PC or Chromebook laptop, one or more Android tablets — perhaps a 10-inch model for work and a 7-inch Nexus 7 for entertainment on the go — and a Nexus Q home entertainment system that you control via an Android device.' So he takes the 'Googleplex' for a test drive to see how well it delivers on the Android/Chrome OS vision." But what about throwing xbmc or MythTV onto an old (or cheap new) box with a couple of huge drives (HDTV's being glorified monitors and all)?

6 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. Sounds like a dream come true... by Scowler · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... for advertisers.

    1. Re:Sounds like a dream come true... by Scowler · · Score: 5, Insightful

      We're not talking about the generic TV advertisements we just fast forward over using the DVR. We're talking 24/7 tracking, personalized, invasive, interactive commercialization being thrust at your face any time you interact with an electronic device. I'm surprised anyone in the AdBlock Plus crowd (which presumably includes most of Slashdot) would even consider going near this paradigm.

    2. Re:Sounds like a dream come true... by perpenso · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Assuming there would be no possible way for the government to use this information ...

      "No possible way"? If this information exists then the government is always one small step away from accessing it.

      ... how is being able to have more relevant ads directed at you a bad thing?

      You might want to ask the teenager who wasn't ready to tell her parents she was pregnant, whose home started receiving pregnancy related targeted advertising. Pick something you are not ready to share with parents or a spouse or your boss (advertising goes to work not home - for example ads in a browser when your boss walks in), reapply the preceding.

    3. Re:Sounds like a dream come true... by dgatwood · · Score: 4

      The problem is, we already have that. It's called Amazon's suggestions. And it usually does a pretty good job. What it does not do is provide a reason for the product vendors to spend money on financing unrelated things like TV shows.

      Unfortunately for companies like Google and Facebook, the only way targeted advertising can work well is if it is done by a company that actually sells products and knows what a given person has actually been buying. You can't realistically hope to guess what someone is going to be interested in buying based on what they search for or what they talk about (unless they're searching product listings, and even then, without the ability to delete stuff from your search history, searches are useless). It just doesn't work that way. I talk about computers all the time. That doesn't mean I'm in the market for buying a Dell. I'm pretty much a Mac-only house except for a couple of Linux boxen (either old junk hardware or self-built). And I rarely buy software; I have software that does what I need. And I rarely buy computer peripherals. So pretty much anything I talk about on Facebook or search for through Google is going to be a red herring.

      Worse, in a world where just about everything has product reviews on Amazon, if you don't make a good product, it doesn't matter how much advertising you do. When buying products that cost more than a few bucks, most people research the product through such a site. Thus, we're rapidly moving to a point where R&D spending is crucial to sales, and advertising only matters if the potential buyer has never heard of your product.

      Which leads me to the ultimate realization that, at least in the long term, advertising is dead. With the availability of better alternatives that do a great job of showing you things that you want to buy (and only while you're in a shopping mood), there's just no room for advertising in a modern society. Apart from advertising to encourage consumption of cheap trinkets like cans of Coke or movie tickets or whatever, advertising can't realistically provide much benefit to the advertisers above what they get from "people who bought X also bought Y", coupled with reviews. And even then, the value is dubious unless the viewers just happen to be hungry or in the mood to go watch a movie in a crowded theater with a sticky floor and screaming kids throwing popcorn at them.

      Unfortunately for Big Media, this means that in the fairly near future, content creators are going to have to face up to reality and choose one of two paths: direct sales or patronage. Ad-supported content is on the way out, and the sooner everyone acknowledges this, the sooner we can move on to more sustainable business models.

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  2. Unrealistic vision by frovingslosh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Google would like you to believe in a world where you get all of your media from their devices across the Internet. Unfortunately, that just doesn't work in the real world. The little old lady next door has already been hit with insane overage charges by AT&T because she dared to watch Netflix. Follow the Google vision and your overages will not only include things like Netflix but will include your own movies and even music unless you have an uncapped provider who you can believe will stay uncapped (AT&T only announced the caps last year). Maybe in Kansas City where Google offers fiber and doesn't impose monthly limits this would be a good thing, but not in the rest of America where our government grants monopolies to service providers but lets them chip away at the service rather than building out their networks.

    --
    I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
  3. Scary by TheRecklessWanderer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I fear a world run by google and apple. They are both companies with a shiny outer layer and a dark dark underneath that won't be clear until it's too late to do anything about it.People need to remember that (especially google) the people using their services are not their customers, and that google doesn't owe them one thing. They will use every method at their disposal to be able to charge more for whatever advertising/marketing/human sorting they are working on that day. Nothing is free, you pay one way or another. Wether you pay with money or with your personal information, it's just the same.

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    Mean what you say...say what you mean.