Google has lost all hope. Sundar Pinchai is at the helm of the next Titanic and missed the icebergs.....
they have failed to innovate and have doubled down on a losing strategy....I expect a race to the bottom until it kicks and they replace him....but it won't fix the issues...
it's too late. the company is now gorging on the corpse of society that it has nothing left to provide....it has become parasitic
I’ll say that ever since he became CEO the company hasn’t innovated that much. A lot of services get propped up with fanfare then get cut out of the blue. The Google Graveyard seems to have grown a lot with him around.
This is going too far. Now you buy products or service at their fair price (Chromecast, Netflix,...) and they still push advertisment to you without any respect to squeeze the maximum of the user.
What annoys me is that this is done after purchase. It would be one thing if you knew at time of purchase that the hardware was "ad supported", its another to have adverts imposed on you months/years after purchase.
My thoughts are now "How long will it be before google starts running full screen ads after unlocking your phone?"
As another example, I purchased an Xbox One years ago. Imagine my surprise when I turned it on this past November 3rd only to see a fullscreen ad for a videogame, before I could even sign in! And then again for some gamedev conference only a few weeks later!
Not sure (but pretty sure) that from the Xbox 360 onwards there have always been advertisements on the 'dashboard' - but you never had to explicitly interact with the ads before you could do anything else with the darn thing.
Companies seem to think that because there is a screen attached somewhere/somehow to the device they made it's carte blanche for them to turn that screen into a billboard.
I'm not "100%" against adverts (However I will avoid them if I can, for example I'm happy to pay for YouTube Premium simply to disable the ads and still support the creators I watch), I understand that services need to pay the bills, Take YouTube or Twitch an examples, they can't exist without monetization because servers, staff, bandwidth all need to be paid for and obv content creators need an income if the platform/viewers expect high quality content from a wide variety of creators (not just those who can afford to do it as a hobby/fun).
But its the "bait and switch" of these companies that disgusts me, esp when its on locked down hardware we have purchased. It's changing the sales contract after the purchase has been made. How would we feel if for example 2 years after purchasing a car, it now refused to start (or for something more "mild" changing the climate controls) until you had listened to 3 mins of ad's though its infotainment system? People would be up in arms about it. But for some reason, people just seem to accept it when it comes to our entertainment devices.
After years of investing into Google Home, I'm trying to unwind it. The assistant devices have gotten buggier and less responsive. The TV is bloated with ever more ads and suggested videos. They end of lifed the nest security system.
I've always heard that the calculus for a break-in was that even if you had an alarm, they had N minutes to Supermarket Sweep the place before the cops arrived.
Conversely, if there's a surly Rottweiler pacing in the yard, there's the distinct risk if immediate interception.
As most everyone expected, Google removed "Don't be evil" as their motto with the intention of going as far in the other direction as will drive short-term shareholder value.
Looks like Google is pushing or at least trialing full-screen, non-media-content, loud advertisements on their "Google TV" branded products. While this is for Chromecasts, it is possible it's coming to regular Google TV next...
> it is possible it's coming to regular Google TV next
We've all seen this show before and we all know how it plays out:
1) "We have an ad free service!"
2) "We're going to start showing promotions for our own products - they don't count as ads"
3) "We're going to start showing ads for our partners but they'll only be a few seconds long and you can skip them"
4) "We're introducing unskippable ads"
5) "We're now injecting ads directly into the content"
6) "That sure is a nice TV/media service you got there. It would be a shame if we injected so many ads that it becomes unwatchable. LUCKY FOR YOU we have a Premium ad-free tier"
It's astonishing how much Sundar has managed to tarnish Google's brand over the past few years with decisions like this that optimize for short-term gains at the expense of long-term reputational damage and customer goodwill.
I have the old Chromecast that came without a remote and it is great. It just sits there showing nature photos until I select something to watch using my phone.
I also have a "Google TV" one that comes with remote and it is terrible. The home screen is full of crap that I do not want. It suggests stupid youtube stuff for the kids. I have not figured out how to make it act like the old Chromecast.
What's the difference between Android TV and Google TV? Android TV (on my Nvidia Shield) added "recommendations", which are really just ads for streaming service content you may or may not have, but are otherwise associated with things in the ecosystem. Maybe a harbinger of things to come. Like Amazon Prime Video pre-roll ads for Prime content being replaced by regular ads.
I love my shield TV Pro, but I might `adb shell pm uninstall` the shit out of it, so I can launch my apps in peace.
The Update that replaces the old launcher was the biggest middle finger I ever saw. And it's a 200€+ device. This isn't your average 20€ Amazon Fire crap.
The middle-finger update seems to be geo-fenced. On my fully updated shield, the launcher is almost the same as the original one -- it just got a new apps tab on the top; no recommendations, no ads. So hopefully it will stay that way.
We truly live in a boring dystopia. It is insane to think how much money and how many absolutely seething customers this will make and it happens again and again.
they have failed to innovate and have doubled down on a losing strategy....I expect a race to the bottom until it kicks and they replace him....but it won't fix the issues...
it's too late. the company is now gorging on the corpse of society that it has nothing left to provide....it has become parasitic