Two Tales Of Extreme High-Tech Evil (and yes, one is Google)

In keeping with the name of this blog it is only fitting that I get around to revealing and railing against two of the more irritating business practices in the high-tech world. Unless you are a stockholder of Google or Hewlett-Packard that is!

The first practice concerns Google’s AdSense scheme. This program allows you – as a website owner – to place a small box on your website into which Google dynamically loads text (or now display or video) ads. The ads are context-sensitive, meaning if your website talks about tropical fish, Google will send tropical fish ads to your box. If someone clicks on the ad, they generate money for Google and money for you, depending on what the advertiser has been paying and other algorithms. Ahh…the famous “Google algorithms.”

Unlike virtually any other partnership known to man, Google will not reveal what percentage of the revenue they pay you. You just get a check. You got a problem wit dat, too bad. What are we, the website owners, getting? 30%? 35%, 19%? No idea. And the contract with Google plainly states that they will never ever tell you. So think of this now, you are Google with millions of clients and a month to go in the quarter. Need to increase revenue at a 100% margin? Just change the formula! Last quarter they paid the website owners 30%. This quarter they pay 29%. The math is too painful to do.

Now this is just conjecture, right? Google wouldn’t do this, after all, that would be evil. To that, all I can say is that 5 years ago we got checks in the $600-700 dollar range monthly. More recently that had trickled down to less than $100 despite having tripled our page views served. Recently we decided it wasn’t worth it and took Google AdSense off our sites. You decide.

And another thing……

How about the HP 4480 printer we (my family) bought a year or so ago that tells YOU when to replace the ink cartridges. No, not warns you. The printer demands you replace the ink cartridges NOW or it will not print. WTF?! I’ll decide when the ink is too faded thank you, after all aren’t I the one driving the car? What if I have run out of cartridges and I just need one little copy? What if I don’t care if the magenta is 10% too strong? It’s an outrageous gun-to-the-head move by HP to sell more ink - I mean who even knows how empty these things are. In the old days when HP gave you a warning, (and it was up to you what to do with it), you could get another 20-80 copies out of the cartridge. Not now. Printer won’t let you.

Nice way to juice up revenues but I’m buying a Canon or Epson today. And will never ever ever buy another HP printer again.

Harrumph!