“‘What is Google? What do they sell?’ asks Don Norman, the author of The Design of Everyday Things and a demigod of the design world,” Bobbie Johnson reports for GigaOM.
“In a talk on Friday at the dConstruct conference in Brighton, England, he pointed out that – despite the complexity of the organization — the answer usually looks pretty simple,” Johnson reports. “‘They have lots of people, lots of servers, they have Android, they have Google Docs, they just bought Motorola. Most people would say ‘we’re the users, and the product is advertising,” he said. ‘But in fact the advertisers are the users and you are the product.'”
Johnson reports, “Then he went further. ‘They say their goal is to gather all the knowledge in the world in one place, but really their goal is to gather all of the people in the world and sell them.’ …Ultimately, his charge was one that Google has seen many times before: that it is a machine which needs humans but doesn’t like them very much. Whether it’s in its social networks, its interfaces, or other elements of its design, Google is merely applying a thin veneer that often apes Apple’s approach without understanding it.”
Read more in the full article – recommended – here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “HotinPlaya” for the heads up.]
Not much different than other publishers, just more efficient at it. That’s why they all hate the App store model, they can’t get the human info to sell to advertisers if you subscribe via Apple.
We are Soylent Green to Google.
“Soylent Green is… PEOPLE!!” Love that line.
Not sure why it was recommended to read the full article, it really didn’t expound any further on this subject. I was hoping for some good information about this so I can show my wife what google is really up to, she is a fan of free, but doesn’t understand the costs associated with free.
You can read just about anything on Google’s business model on sites like Roughly Drafted (.com).
Can never understand people who think, “I should get paid for my work, but other people should give me their work for free.”
Google = The Borg
Google is an enigma: it purports to “do no evil” but yet it relishes in activities that border on the dark side of the divide. It tends to treat people as mere commodities and digits. It even digitizes its employees as mere numbers instead of as real individuals. Thus, it refers its employees as “Employee No. 1”, etc. Google tries to airbrush its activities as altruistic, yet it tramples on privacy and it fudges on its message of what its ultimate goal is. It is anticompetitive and fools consumers into thinking that it is Father Christmas.
i read the comments after the referenced article yesterday and i was struck by the fact that an awful lot of google fans are in denial about them being the product and the advertisers being the real customers. it is so obvious i don’t know why they don’t see this. or maybe they don’t want to see it – which is why i came to the conclusion that since they are generally smart people they must be in denial – kind of a stockholm syndrome variant.
Google doesn’t sell info, it sells your eyeballs to the highest bidder.
To repeat the often said line, “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product, not the customer.”
Why I don’t like free stuff.
Google takes advantage of the fact that no one knows how invasive they are, really. There’s an awful lot of trust that hasn’t been earned based on a business model that isn’t very well-understood – something you can see unfold comically the next time a 50-something elected official tries to depose one of their executives.
How Google compiles personal information to ensure the “anonymity” of individuals when this data is packaged for advertisers is open to a lot of speculation. Neckbeards keep crowing about this being “the new normal” and something that’s “not a big deal”, yet I think if the average user of a Google product like Gmail had it explained to them – in layman’s terms – what Google actually *did* with their information, a lot fewer people would be using them.
GREAT point.
There are now at least a dozen utilities for various browsers the keep Google the hell out of your business. They are at this point very clunky, but they work well. Google’s behavior on my computers is under MY control.
But how many average users know what an HTML ‘Cookie’ is, let alone how to delete it, white list it, black list it, etc? Google has herded the sheeple. Off to the marketing abattoir they go; Happy, shiny, smiley sliding down the chute…
A lot of modern biznizz is based upon treating humans as sheeple. No thank you! 😎