I just want to mark this week on my calendar as the first time I've started having negative feelings about Google. I sense some kind of opinion watershed on the horizon and I want to put a flag on this moment.
But what is causing it? Do you feel it, too? Is Google starting to annoy you? Maybe they crossed some kind of Starbucks threshold. Starbucks was once a small local company; now they own the world and are hated by hip people everywhere for causing most of the world’s ills and being a hyper-mega conglomo-corp. So at some point a line was crossed.
It’s a classic philosophical question: “when is a chair no longer a chair?”. I put up with Firefox’s eccentricities and blame the pain points it’s (albeit more correct) interpretation of CSS and so forth bring me, because, why? It’s the underdog? It’s the way forward? In the same way, I supported Google and hated Yahoo. And yet now...
I hear the grumblings. People are getting ready to hate Google. Will Apple be next?
posted by justin at 1/11/2007 06:18:00 PM |
1 Comments:
This reminds me of my favorite conundrum: "the inefficient pleasures of individual craftsmanship versus the alienating economies of scale" (I made that up -- catchy, no?). I may have made this particular point/rant before, but I don't hate Starbucks at all on political grounds (no pun intended), because they are big and efficient enough to offer benefits to their employees and do so. I guess they could do more, but in substantial ways they are better to their workers than a lot of those small, indy coffee shops which are constantly going out of business. They also open storefronts in places like (what used to be) our low-rent neck of the wood. There's three coffee shops in downtown St. Johns now -- one right next door to Starbucks selling delicious Stumptown -- but it didn't used to be that way. Starbucks was the first, and for quite awhile only place you could go that wasn't serving booze in downtown St. Johns, and I'm actually kind of grateful to them for that.
That having been said, my appreciation of Starbucks tends to be at this political/intellectual level-- when I actually go into a Starbucks I find myself feeling resentful for no particular reason, and insist on ordering drinks by the ounce even when I know damn well I want a grande. On a cultural level, I don't like that much homogenization. It creeps me out. And there's the underdog element, too. I donno. It's complicated.
Anyway, we'll see what happens with Google. Maybe there's a reason for the parallels between Starbucks and Google?
Post a Comment
<< Home