For years, it seems, Google stuck to its old motto: "Don't be mean." It didn't seem to hurt in terms of product superiority either.
Google has built its reputation as an ethical company that has outperformed its competitors. But is this reputation still deserved?
One thing is certain: the year was a bad one for Google's reputation.
Does Google engage in unethical business practices?
A 2020 antitrust lawsuit filed by a coalition of US states and published unredacted last week alleges that Google suppressed competition by rigging ad auctions.
Google has used what are called "second price" auctions, in which the highest bidder wins the auction, but pays the publisher an amount equal to the second highest bid. If one company offers €10 per click, another offers €8 and another €6. The €10 bidder wins, but pays the publisher €8 per click.
Google is accused of lying about its "second price" auction and running a scam in which it pays the publisher the third-highest bid, charges the advertiser the second-highest bid, and misappropriates the difference to increase bids. so the bids on Google platform would be lower than those on competing platforms.
Google switched to a "first price" system in 2019, but the lawsuit alleges that Google is looking for a version of the program under the internal codename "Bulbasaur."
Google says the lawsuit is inaccurate, lacks legal merit, and “as of September 2019, we have been running a first-price auction. In the days AG Paxton refers to, AdX was absolutely a second-price auction.
Another part of the lawsuit claims that Google conspired with Facebook to divide the online advertising market and exclude competitors.
This alleged scheme involved Google giving Meta (the company formerly known as Facebook) preferential pricing and treatment in exchange for Facebook avoiding direct competition with Google.
Google and Meta claim that their arrangement improved competition and was not illegal.
The trial will take place in 2023 at the earliest.
While this allegation was already public, legal documents filed with the lawsuit allege that Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai "personally signed the terms of the agreement" (as did Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, although Meta is not a defendant in the case). ).
The deal was referred to internally at Google as "Jedi Blue," a reference to the color of the Facebook logo.
The lawsuit is one of several government antitrust lawsuits Google is currently facing in the United States and around the world, most of which center on allegations that it abused its dominant position to favor its own business and exclude competitors. .
A class action lawsuit filed this month alleges that Google illegally pays Apple a portion of search profits to stay out of the search business and give Google Search preferential treatment over other search apps. The suit alleges a secret non-compete and profit-sharing agreement between the two Silicon Valley giants.
These lawsuits allege collusion with other big tech giants to exclude competitors. But Google had ethical failings that didn't involve collusion. For example, last year it unabashedly attracted millions of Google Photos users.
When Google removed the Photos feature from Google+ in 2015, it came up with an unprecedented offer: unlimited free photo storage!
The free storage option has encouraged millions of users to upload a large number of photos to the service. And the Google Photos app encouraged users to delete local copies to save space on local storage, which means that for most users, Google Photos has the only copy of the photos that people use to capture moments of their lives: their children, their deceased loved ones, irreplaceable memories. .
But as of June 1 (after users uploaded more photos than they could reasonably upload), Google reneged on that agreement and set a new free storage quota limit of 15GB (Google has offered a confusing set of exceptions). for owners of different Pixel phones). )
The free storage bait came with a catch: you had to let Google compress and downgrade your photos. Most users chose this option because they didn't want to pay for storage. After allowing Google to permanently lower the quality of everyone's photos, many customers will eventually have to pay anyway.
(Note that the fine print in Google's terms of service didn't promise to keep the free unlimited storage offer forever. But users were misled into thinking it did.)
Has Google lost its product quality mojo?
A trend has emerged with Google, namely wasting early leads at the expense of customers. For example, when the pandemic hit and organizations sent millions of employees to work from home, the group video chat platform Zoom became dominant.
Why doesn't Google own this space?
Google Hangouts launched as a feature of the now-defunct Google+ social network in 2011 (the same year Zoom Video Communications was founded) and launched as a standalone app in 2013 (the same year Zoom was founded). . Google had a huge advantage in both product quality and market share. But Hangouts changed focus, purpose and target audience until Google killed it in 2019, just before the pandemic hit and made Zoom the business tool of 2020, 2021 and 2022.
It is and should be considered a fiasco. But that's just a small part of Google's total failure to dominate the larger world of person-to-person communication.
This fact was highlighted by Google's own criticism of Apple recently. The official Google Android Twitter account complained this month that "iMessage shouldn't profit from bullying. Texting should bring us closer, and the solution is there. Let's fix this as one industry."
The tweet expanded on a link to a Wall Street Journal article complaining that Apple's iMessage interface, which shows non-iMessage users in green instead of blue, stigmatizes teens who own Android phones and constitutes intimidation and exploitation of peer pressure to force iPhone sales. among teenagers.
In "Let's Solve This As One Industry," Google makes an implicit call for Apple to embrace Rich Communication Services (RCS), which is better than texting but a decade behind modern messaging services like iMessage.
The irony is that only Google was able to "fix" the incompatible messaging platform fiasco we're all dealing with. As Ars Technica recently detailed, since Apple launched iMessage in 2011, Google has released 13 messaging products, and phased out five.
Google Hangouts, which also launched as a Google+ feature the same year iMessage arrived (and as a standalone product two years later), was the perfect competitor to iMessage. Google could have focused on this one app, pushed its use across platforms, and the world would no longer need iMessage and that stigmatizes green bubbles. I wouldn't need WhatsApp either.
Google blames Apple for not being compatible, but it can't even make messaging apps that work with its own messaging apps.
Google has also stagnated its smartphone business, from the HTC, Nexus and Moto X ranges to the current range labeled Pixel. The Pixel line of phones launched in 2016, and the company released version 6 on October 28.
Google is one of many Android phone makers that competes in consumer and business markets with Apple, which consistently offers very high-quality phones in surprisingly large numbers.
And yet, after all these reviews, Google is still struggling to make a smooth product. The Pixel 6 shipped with pesky issues (and a December update that introduced additional bugs), inspiring smartphone influencer Marques Brownlee to tweet: “My Pixel 6 Pro has gotten so buggy since it launched in October that it's already gone. can't recommend it at €900. Combined with the last failed update, it's just a bad experience.
Some users are complaining about slow and unreliable fingerprint scanning, issues with the phone randomly disconnecting from Android Auto, unreliable Wi-Fi, and poor battery performance. Most of the problems seem to be software that isn't ready, rather than troublesome hardware.
One headline said it out loud: "Google's Pixel 6 problems cause a crisis of confidence."
When ethical and product failures collide
A recent event suggests both ethical transgressions and product flaws.
Last week, the International Trade Commission (ITC) ruled that Google had infringed five Sonos patents and threatened to restrict the import and sale of Nest smart speakers. But instead of apologizing for stealing intellectual property and paying royalties for infringing patents, Google chose to disable the infringing features, on which Google customers based their purchases.
The Google Product Serial Killer Problem
And, of course, one of the biggest sources of distrust in Google is the company's habit of launching new services with great fanfare, convincing its most avid users to adopt those platforms, and then shutting them down. Sites like KilledByGoogle.com list services that Google has shut down. Even if there were good reasons to cancel these products, their frequency makes users reluctant to trust or invest time in a specific Google product or service.
The next major product to be shut down will be the previous version of Google Voice (next month), and with this shutdown, Google will be removing some of Voice's coolest features, like
operator call forwarding, ringtone scheduling, do not disturb timer, and other features. (A new voice app will retain some of the features of the old voice app.)
The closure does not affect Google Workspace Voice accounts.
So can we trust Google?
To me, the most interesting fact about all these allegations and complaints is that none of them affect Google's business and enterprise customers or products.
Advertisers, competitors and consumers have concerns. But there's no big new reason for businesses and other large organizations to be wary of Google products in this space. In fact, it seems to me that we are seeing the collateral damage of a company that slowly goes from consumers to businesses.
The courts will settle the lack of legal ethics. Consumer demand will punish Google for failures in consumer products. But for business customers, Google remains an ethical and trustworthy provider that is no less trustworthy than in the past.
How's that for a resounding endorsement?
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