From Danny Sullivan at Marketing Land comes news of a surprisingly candid Microsoft explanation of why services on the Web give you things for free.
Google is in the process of making some unpopular changes to some of their most popular products. Those changes, cloaked in language like "transparency," "simplicity" and "consistency," are really about one thing: making it easier for Google to connect the dots between everything you search, send, say or stream while using one of their services.Now, Microsoft is basically right here. And they acknowledge that it's not "wrong" but that different services can make different bets and different trade-offs. I went to Bing Search more than two years ago because I liked their trade-offs better. They didn't connect the your Live Mail account information with your Bing Search information, for example. As Google connects more and more, I'm increasingly happy that I made the move.But, the way they're doing it is making it harder for you to maintain control of your personal information. Why are they so interested in doing this that they would risk this kind of backlash? One logical reason: Every data point they collect and connect to you increases how valuable you are to an advertiser.
To be clear, there's nothing inherently wrong with wanting to improve the quality of an advertising product. But, that effort needs to be balanced with continuing to meet the needs and interests of users. Every business finds its own balance and attracts users who share those priorities. Google's new changes have upset that balance, with users' priorities being de-prioritized. Thats why people are concerned and looking for alternatives.
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Google likes to say that alternatives are just a click away but that's not really true. It takes a while to extricate yourself from Google's services and to learn and train new services. I took me a while to get used to Bing but once I learned how to talk to Bing (think about it, you've been learning what Google search wants to hear for years) I started getting really good results. I never used Gmail for anything but a throw-away account but I'm still stuck using their office apps because my colleagues do. Anyway, my plan was never to become invisible to Google, just to try to keep them from knowing everything about me. They still surveil me with their ad networks and their analytics probes and their various youtube and maps embeds and whatnot, but connecting that web-wide surveillance up to my daily interests is now a bit harder for them because I've distributed myself across several service providers instead of just one.