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Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

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Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

#191

Post by esafak »

refulgentis wrote: post #94
Mistletoe wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I naive to think that when you make $226 million in a year like Pichai that money should stop being your major driving force and that your reputation is more important? Like what else could he buy? But his reputation is taking severe hits. Maybe I just don't understand ultra rich people though. Maybe money is everything.

When you get that high up in a corp., your North Star is “shareholder value”, and you’re probably right to do that. I wouldn’t want to and won’t if I was ever lucky enough to have the opportunity. But what are the alternatives?

Crashing your company does not create shareholder value.

Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

#192

Post by TheBozzCL »

ydant wrote: post #176
charcircuit wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you quickly bail from email? It is a lot of effort to switch to a new email. The friction to levave is so high that your points 2 and 3 are not true.

If you own your own domain name for your email, then it's pretty simple and will take a few hours of effort to get fully moved over. Part of why I pushed myself to move away from Gmail was I was still using the @gmail address occasionally. Luckily, I'd been using my own domains for a long time for most emails, so it's been a pretty easy transition - I still have Fastmail poll Gmail for emails to make sure I see the o…

That's easy for tech people... but an insurmountable hurdle for everyone else.

I say that as a techie with his own domain.

Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

#194

Post by dingosity »

o10449366 wrote: post #28
ProjectArcturis wrote: post #20

Google now seems deep into the enshittification [1] process. Of all the big tech companies, they seemed the most customer-friendly, the least constrained by the need to optimize their money hose. But I guess the economic logic of tying executive compensation to short-term share price simply overwhelmed other considerations. The stock must go up, so revenues must grow, so Google must monetize everything to the maximum…

Customer-friendly? Maybe if you've never required support or human engagement for any issue. If you have, Google is by far the worst among the big tech companies.

Except maybe eBay. I wanted to call eBay and ask how I purchase a support contract so I could report a bug in their returns system, but there's no way to contact them for that. But yeah... they're at the same level.

Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

#195

Post by tortoise_in »

o10449366 wrote: post #28
ProjectArcturis wrote: post #20

Google now seems deep into the enshittification [1] process. Of all the big tech companies, they seemed the most customer-friendly, the least constrained by the need to optimize their money hose. But I guess the economic logic of tying executive compensation to short-term share price simply overwhelmed other considerations. The stock must go up, so revenues must grow, so Google must monetize everything to the maximum…

Customer-friendly? Maybe if you've never required support or human engagement for any issue. If you have, Google is by far the worst among the big tech companies.

Atleast Google gives you help to unlock the bootloaders. Not like crap apple walled garden

Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

#196

Post by toomuchtodo »

skippyboxedhero wrote: post #184
toomuchtodo wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because if they're wrong, it's the consulting company's fault, not the executive's. It is accountability laundering with a budget.

Yes, I asked the question facetiously...I worked in equity research for consumer products companies, and you see this (alarmingly) at good and bad companies. "We did X, it went very badly...don't worry, we have fired the consultant who was responsible"...the question you want to ask (but cannot) is then: why I am paying the salary for the monkey, not the organ-grinder? The worst part is that I have seen this at compa…

The sarcasm did not come through, my apologies!

Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

#197

Post by hgs3 »

pjmlp wrote: post #14

Only GMail? YouTube is almost unusable nowadays.

> YouTube is almost unusable nowadays.

Ads aren't the only problem. The YouTube recommendation algorithm works a little too well. I'll watch one video on a topic and then YouTube thinks I'm in love with it and floods my feed with 100 other related videos. It's terrible for discovering new content.

Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

#199

Post by freeqaz »

dingosity wrote: post #194
o10449366 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Customer-friendly? Maybe if you've never required support or human engagement for any issue. If you have, Google is by far the worst among the big tech companies.

Except maybe eBay. I wanted to call eBay and ask how I purchase a support contract so I could report a bug in their returns system, but there's no way to contact them for that. But yeah... they're at the same level.

I almost lost ~$10k when selling some NVIDIA GPUs on eBay but the buyer claimed they had "fallen out" of the box.

I had insurance on the box but the buyer wouldn't return the box to Fedex for inspection. (Because it was fraud)

Getting this fixed was excruciating and ended up having to DM people on LinkedIn and guess their internal e-mail addresses to get this resolved. Absolutely horrible!

Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

#200

Post by tomjen3 »

charcircuit wrote: post #164
Night_Thastus wrote: post #71

This is part of why I chose a paid e-mail service. 1: No ads, ever 2: No reason to sell my data. They already have income, and if users found out they were selling data, they'd quickly bail from it (At least with the service I use, which is aimed more at users with privacy concerns), which would ruin their steady revenue. 3: Actually a reason to IMPROVE the product, because again, users will leave if the competition…

How do you quickly bail from email? It is a lot of effort to switch to a new email. The friction to levave is so high that your points 2 and 3 are not true.

I am in the process of doing that, and my answer has been to move all the things that I can to the new account, and then keep the old one around until nothing more I care about comes there.

And you can be I own the domain for the new email. Not going to make that mistake again.

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