Google has no clue how to maintain anything approaching a traditional customer relationship. They sort of got lucky with ads and everything else is a side show in terms of revenue so there's no incentive to develop products or businesses further.

I want them to succeed so bad. I try to support them.

But you're 100% right. The user experience for glass and google fi have both been pretty horrible. They don't even have a mechanism to receive feedback, yet they are purporting that I am "beta testing" for them.

I have a feeling when they want to know whats good or bad at about a product, they look 95% at a database.

They are a frustrating company to care about. They have so much that's so important that they're working on, but they're like some half-interested genius teenager with a short attention span. They just don't have a significant commitment to anything other than making money through ad revenue, and that's practically heart-breaking.

> Google has no clue how to maintain anything approaching a traditional customer relationship

Yeah, that's a good way to say it. It just seems as they don't even believe in their products themselves, whom they're for and how/if they'll maintain it. They're great at making "tech demos" (for IO specifically), but products? Nope, sorry.

It's not about belief really, it's about necessity. At google it basically rains ad money 24/7, that plus backbone internet traffic is where the vast majority of their money comes from, and it's a ton of money. For everything else it doesn't matter if it's successful as a business or not. In fact, the best case scenario is mediocrity and barely breaking even in terms of costs. Because that means there are no consequences, no bigger implications, no expectations for improvement, etc. Google is sitting on several enormous multi-billion dollar businesses (youtube and office tools, for example) but they don't care to actually develop them into such. Right now they can afford to not care, and all of the internal incentives are aligned to promote not caring.

I agree with you. The only downside of this attitude might be the customer trust on the long run and with their future products. Basically, how long can they afford to be mediocre in those areas and will they eventually run out of people who weren't burnt for their money?

Also upcoming public awareness about ads/tracking and how to block them might bring significant changes in their revenue success.

Ads in general are in a long, slow slide into oblivion, so google will likely eventually have to change, but when the crunch comes will they be able to?

And yet Chromecast is a hit (#2 in all Electronics on Amazon).

It is also cheap. I bet many are now sitting unused in drawers.

So cheap that I almost bought one on impulse, until I realized that I have no idea what I'd do with it. I'm sure a lot of people don't make it to that second step until after they click the "buy" button.

I can't imagine doing without one. What's do you use to stream arbitrary content to a big screen?

I have an Apple TV and an Xbone. Between the two I stream everything I care to stream, as well as anything on the local NAS. I'm not saying the Chromecast isn't useful, it's just not useful to me considering what I've already purchased. IOW, in my case Google was late to the game.