Isn't it time that Google grows up and becomes a true tech company? I consider products containing adware to be "half-broken" and I don't understand how Google engineers can feel proud of their work. As an engineer I want my work to be paid for because my users like my products, and I certainly wouldn't want any of my work to be used to serve anyone other than my users.

Do you pay for YouTube premium? Options are there, but it seems like most users prefer ad supported content to paid content in many contexts.

Google Play Music is awesome. I love that I can keep my personal collection of rare MP3s there and have them in a convenient cloud player. Ad-free YouTube is just icing on the cake.

Adware based products win in the marketplace.

Google can't change that.

At least the money from those adware products goes toward deep tech r&d. It could be worse.

Unless one day they take it a step too far, and the entire tracking-based monetization scheme is banned by the government or the EU. I hope they have a backup plan other than lobbying in the opposite direction.

Why do you think they are pumping dozens of billions into cloud and especially AI? At its heart, according to the founders, Google is not a search company, and not an ad company. Their primary long term goal is the creation of real artificial intelligence. The ad business provides the money. The money buys the best people and all the infrastructure. The user-facing business provides the data. By all accounts you need a trillion dollar setup, as much talent as you can , and pretty much all the data in the world to get started.

Considering the thread about Google's Soli [0] has a huge number of votes, there's a clear sign that many are still heavily plugged into the borg. I'd suggest that even more would disagree with the suggestion that Google isn't a real tech company.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21269877

The topic might be heavily upvoted, but the overall sentiment in the comments in notably negative.

Do you have an example of a “true tech company”?

Oracle fits this description nicely. :)

No that's a law firm :)

And a strip and gut, tech acquisition company.

SpaceX, Intel, Microsoft, Nvidia, ...

AWS is the most true tech company out there I think, I wish there were a way for me to invest in it outside of the Amazon borg cube media conglomerate trying to fight Disney.

I don't like the always-on surveillance either.

But if people choose these products because the convenience is worth it in their estimation, revealed preferences and all that.

Maybe this suggests a counter-product? An offline, all data is local, product opportunity. Who will build it?

Many (most?) that buy them don’t understand the value exchange they are signing up for. Look at all the breathless articles about how humans listen to Alexa, Cortana, Siri, Google, etc assistant chats. That’s an standard expectation from anyone that gets close to working with supervised learning but from the reporting and interviews it seems many didn’t know. How could they with the ever growing legal soup of privacy policies and tos.

I’d love to see a counter product but more than that I’d like to see more standardized and short/brief lay person understandable policies. Maybe like a nutrition label but for consumer data.

> But if people choose these products because the convenience is worth it in their estimation, revealed preferences and all that.

"is worth it" requires people to be fully aware of what's going on.

I've described what some of these devices are doing based on product announcements, patents, investigative news stories, and that sort of thing. I've had numerous people tell me that I'm wrong. That they don't believe companies are doing this.

This has caused me to come to the conclusion that people aren't aware of the trade-offs or what is going on.

That lack of understanding concerns me.

>This has caused me to come to the conclusion that people aren't aware of the trade-offs or what is going on.

But what exactly is going on? It's not like google going to blackmail you for 10K USD in cash, single payment please, once it will learn that you are going to the same pub and spend 2 hours there daily, "or we will let your boss know".

It will show you more relevant ads, right. But do you really expect an average person to be scared by this?

Google probably will not, but can you say that about every Google employee?

Seems a bit patronizing. People can actually make a conscious decision to prefer convenience over surrender of some privacy. Some people don't put shades or curtains on their windows.

Sure, but people generally understand how window shades work, whereas people generally don't understand how the surveillance economy works. That would be a patronizing assumption inside HN, but outside HN it's a reality that I regularly observe.

Currently working on this with Secure Scuttlebutt, FWIW.

Don't forget that you pay them for the privilege of using such devices.

But "ambient computing" sounds so pleasant, so friendly.

It sounds like walking through a forest of ferns.

Perhaps that is true with Google’s products. As some else here said, they should grow up and figure out a business model that does not requires collecting so much data. I would prefer to pay them in cash than with my information.

For ambient computing, my favorite things are my Apple Watch and iPods. True enough, using Siri and these devices is using black box devices, but for now I am OK with them. I trust Apple, for now.

You think they could save some money offering people a yearly "no ads" plan, across all google properties and any site with doubleclick and ads words. Very strange that they only offer paid plans for office productivity, youtube, and backups.

It would be even cooler if a certain percentage of the rate was a "designate your target" that allowed you to directly fund things like google reader etc.

It's also kind of crazy they dont have some kind of pricing sheet that shows me all the subscriptions available to me, along with some bundle options. I have to search out each product to see its price. It's like they dont want me to look for ways to give them money.

The minute they put prices on their products managers, engineers, users and everyone will go crazy to game the system.

I'm not saying it cannot be done well, but there's certainly an overhead if you have to be explicit about what costs how much to whom.

Can't give you enough upvotes, but at least I gave you all I have.

"coercing" how?

You're no coerced in any way. Don't use Google.

That's almost impossible. If you were to send me an email you would be using Google and not even know it because I host my domain mx there.

So ? Don't host your domain there.