Analysis/Rant: Google
Google is beginning to annoy me.
Before I explain why, let me establish a couple of things. First, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Second, contrary to the general belief Google services are not free; you may not actually pay for them in cash, but you certainly pay for them in other ways.
Third, the mass of people who use Google’s ‘free’ services such as search, maps, and G+ are not customers. They are the raw material in a technical-industrial process that results in valuable aggregate data that Google sends to its real customers – those companies that pay hard cash to use its advertising and analysis data.
This is why Google has no customer service or means of getting in touch with them for the masses. You only provide customer service for customers.
So why are they annoying me, given that I’m well aware of the above facts, and have been for a long time? It’s because they are trying to unify the three different accounts I have with them under a single G+ banner. This means that they are mixing up my different identities which is causing me problems – minor ones at the moment, but it will only get worse.
Different identities? No, I’m not some sort of international crook, with a vast collection of different passports, driving licenses, and bank accounts (if only...). We all (well nearly all) have and use different identities every day, each of them a different facet of our overall personality.
My work personality is different from my home personality – I don’t usually discuss politics at work, or surrealist art, jazz, English history, the US Civil War, science fiction, archeology, sociology (which I have a degree in), or typography, just to mention a few of my non-work related interests.
When I was giving talks about programming and technology, and before that when I was involved in political activism, I had a different, much more confident outgoing personality than I normally have. Deceit? No. Just one of the things that we all do as part of our daily routine to survive in human society. We partition ourselves to adjust to the current circumstances. One of the consequences of this is that if a facet gets into the wrong set of circumstances the result can be serious problems – especially for politicians!
What Google are doing is trying to mix up the online components of my job, my outside work technical interests, and my personal life, each of which has its own email address. I don’t want personal stuff mixed into my work communications. I don’t put this out under my work address.
Sometimes the line is very clear – work/personal is completely separate, and I want to keep it that way. Personal/outside technical is more blurry, but the divide still exists. And I don’t want Google messing with it.
Why are Google doing this? It’s obviously part of an overall plan to consolidate things and give Google more control over its ‘raw materials’ in the future. But the fact that they could choose to do it this way (they have the capability to do this behind the scenes, rather that openly, I sure) indicates a sociology problem, not a technical one.
I said earlier that we all have a myriad of different identities. This is perhaps a sweeping statement; it would be more accurate, perhaps, to qualify it by adding ‘to a greater or lesser extent’. Most ordinary people have at least a work and a home identity. But the people who work at Google are, from my observations, different. For them there is no distinction between in work and outside work, if only because there is so little time outside work, and their focus is on their Google work.
And Google itself compounds this. Staff are picked up from home by coaches, bussed into the Google Plex, they eat in Google restaurants in the buildings, and when, eventually, they finish work, they go home by Google coach. Google is not just work, it’s their life. In the circumstances, it’s not surprising that they have no concept of having different identities. For them Google is the sum total of their way of life.
And this shows up time and time again in the decisions made by Google – technically brilliant decisions marred by an inability to analyse the social implications of what they propose.
Hmmm... I think that’s enough of a rant. And in case you are wondering, yes, I really do like Google, though they drive me to distraction, and I’d hate to actually work for them!
Alan Lenton
22 December 2013