“‘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.]