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It wasn't underhanded. It was overhanded. It was forced on their users to the detriment of pretty much everything associated. Tyranny supplants trust. If "Igor Partola" is your real name, I think statistically there's a good chance that you understand this innately. Now, you can argue that the trust was misplaced, or that the author's use of the word "trust" to describe the basis of their users's relationship with and affinity for Google, but I think this is a quibble. It's straight-up goodwill that has been squandered, and it is not in Google's character to admit failure (Scorpion and the Frog), which further corrodes the connection between the company and its users. "What did you expect?" Yeah, well screw you, too. If Eric Schmidt wants to tell us that if we don't want to use our real names and stuff on Google+ that we don't have to use the service at all, then hey, "I'm a step ahead of you, bub." That's why this article exists, and that's why Sergey is slithering away from G+, and that's why Vic Gundotra left, and at the end of the day Google has a massive failure on their hands and they have too much money to even countenance facts. What will be the Information Age equivalent of wearing Kleenex boxes on one's feet? "I have nothing to admit," said Gilles Deleuze once upon a time, but the market has eaten up large companies before. While Google-large falling by the Internet wayside would be fairly seismic in historical terms, it would happen slowly enough for nobody to really notice. People already talk about the ins-and-outs of Facebook, it's not a huge jump for them to start talking about the ups-and-downs of DuckDuckGo. Google's already helping that happen by converting Chrome's address bar, where grandmas the world over type what they're looking for, into the browser's search field. |