Posted by: Chester

I love cheap stuff - not badly made, but rather well priced. Who doesn’t though really. We all love the idea of cheap phone calls around the world, cheap internet access, cheap online porn, cheap gas…

But the price paid in the long term may actually be very high. Think P.T. Barnum, that circus rogue from the last century. He coined the sucker born every minute line and I fear that our friends at Google are betting their IPO on that very fact when it comes to the digital realm.

What self respecting San Franciscan would not jump at the chance for free high speed internet service provided by that mammoth of the internet world - Google, with it’s new test service in the Bay Area.

And even those with the lowest phone bills at the end of every month are eventually going to sign up for GoogleTalk, or GoogleTap as I like to think of it. The Google bar is everywhere, so from a product placement point of view they have a huge advantage in the long term over all other VOIP providers. Skype may have brand awareness, but Google has product placement in spades.

By way of a beta test, Google has forced an entire industry to revisit the idea of free internet and has now seriously sped up the world wide switch to VOIP. Everyone trusts Google, so everyone will put faith in VOIP and free internet. So happy will we all be with all this cheap stuff that we will forget all about privacy issues and personal space. All the calls and surfing we do will become information, readily ‘catalogued and filed’ by Google, just like they said they would do with the world’s info.

A free on ramp - talk about the best location for a giant cookie to track you and wow! the irresistable price point. And with GoogleTap, even our voices can now be ‘catalogued and filed’ for future reference when the world is divided between Us and Them and sides need to be taken and opposition quelled.

Can they not just be happy with being a search engine? Why all the cheap add ons? Is it like crack in the 90’s - sell it cheap so your client base expands, get them hooked, then own them forever. I don’t want to be owned just because some amazingly democratic technology devolved into a monopoly of ‘organized information’ sold to the higest bidder (read corporations and gov’t) while none of us were looking.

I have a son to be born any minute of any day over the next week and a half and I hope he does not grow to be the sucker for that minute of that day.

Let’s all take a little time to teach ourselves and each other another old adage - Too Good to Be True.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 17th, 2005 at 2:02 pm and is filed under Google the Good.