Google's Bait and Switch
Ok, so Google is the darling child of investors and users alike. Or so I read.
I'm going to use up some of this space to explain why I don't think they're quite the darling child that they appear to be. In fact, I think they're more subversive than anything else, and are using a cash-funded bait-and-switch tactic to hook users with freebie items, and then slam them with advertisements.
One thing to remember ... I do use
Google. I'm writing this on
Blogger, I use Google as my search engine, and when I feel like earning an income, I use
Google AdWords to advertise for my clients. I run
Picasa (amongst others) on my laptop. But, I also use
MapQuest (not
Google Maps), and
AIM (not
Google Talk).
Google emerged on the scene in a rather slow (and well documented elsewhere) way. I'm told they had some difficulties getting VC Investments. However, they very quietly managed to steal users away from
AltaVista, Yahoo, and other darlings of the early days of search. They made sure there were no advertisements, and that the results were blazing fast -- and very accurate. And guess what? Users loved this. I loved this. Everyone I knew used Google, every day. It helped that their mantra, "Do no evil" was right in line with the "
Microsoft is evil" of the time. And, for a long time, Google Search was flagged as "Beta" -- which usually means
"Cutting edge software, may flake out for no explainable reason".
Once Google got the ball rolling (using cash investments of others, and cash / time investments of their own), they started adding some other services. They grabbed up and started Froogle, a very neat catalog search engine. They went at it with a similar gusto that they attacked web search with. And still, little or no advertising. How were they possibly profitable? What next?
[I realize some of these may be out of order ... I'm flexing my aging cranium ... the point still remains]Google
Groups. An interesting acquisition, since DejaNews was where I spent a lot of time doing research on various technical issues. This grabbed them, I would guess, hundreds-of-thousands of consumers / readers / viewers instantly.
Google
Images. They had all the web content ... why not search image names (which is about all it does)?
Gmail. Yahoo had email, why couldn't they? Google took on this task, and provided un-heard of limits on email. Of course, this was released as "Beta" -- and still is. Almost a year later.
Picasa. A fledgling company which edits / crops / brightens and otherwise enhances, sorts, and searches your images from a digital camera. No fee to use. Really.
But ... about this time, I have a feeling that their investors started getting a bit antsy. How were we going to make money with this beast of a service ... which has thousands / millions of users, and we don't make a dime off of any of them? I would stipulate that with the considerable brainpower some of their PhD's have, that this wasn't some fluke ... this has been planned.
They leveraged their customer base, just like any other company would. I have an insurance company that we pay for health insurance. About once a quarter they decide to offer me life insurance also. Why? Because it's cheaper than sending out a mailing to an un-qualified lead. I'm qualified. I read their information, because it
MIGHT be something related to a bill.
Google did exactly this -- with their "free" services. They slowly and quietly introduced advertising, but only on Google Search. The other products, of course, were in Beta. Users searching on Google suddenly had three "top" searches on the top of the screen, and about 6 on the right hand side. Google spun this as "unobtrusive" advertising, therefore it's more "consumer oriented", unlike what Yahoo! was doing at the time. What a crock.
Let's pretend you have some mortal enemy, and want them dead. Pick one -- that guy who cheated off your exams, some elementary school bully, or your favorite politician. Whomever. You get involved in chemical-gas tossing competition. They lob something your way, which explodes, is colorful, makes a very loud "bomb"-like noise when it hits, and generally alerts you it's there. It's giving you every signal of "stay away from this, it's different than the air you are breathing".
And different is bad.So, you lob your canister at them. Your canister doesn't explode. It has no color. It has no odor. Maybe a very small "pop" -- sounding a bit like a dud. Would your opponent run from it? I doubt it. They'd probably wander over to it and try and figure out if it's safe to throw it back at you. Your opponent goes into some long monologue about your soon to be pulverized body. And suddenly, they drop dead. Reminds me of every bad-guy / good-guy movie ever made.
... Which is exactly how advertising got onto the scene, and is still treated, by Google. Let's run through their services which have blatant advertising .... none. Which ones are truly "free"? None.
Google Groups, GMail, and Search all have AdWords advertising on them. Maps either already does, or it's coming soon (if I owned a cab company, I'd probably pay to have visitors see my cabs in their locations too). Picasa is "free" -- if you don't mind the "Order Prints Now!" icons and menu items. Blogger doesn't have any advertising ... yet. But most of the users can easily add Adwords feeds. It's a well documented process. Talk debuted this week, no advertising yet, and there's whispers of about umpteen million other services Google is looking at offering.
I will postulate that the upcoming services will all have the same model going forward. Google buys / creates new service / product. Google offers product for free for about 12 - 24 months. Users flock to it because it's "less evil" than anything produced elsewhere. Google "tests" advertising in the product for another 6 months. Google then slides in advertising into the product. Users are already using the product, and would face some pain to switch. Google scores again.
Prostitute Phobia
I was over browsing
Boing Boing today, and noticed an interesting
Phobia site they had plaquered up.It appears to be using some sort of algorithm to generate the text, using SOME specifics, and a lot of boiler plate text. The pictures, however, are just wonderful. They remind me of the Herpes TV ads (nice woman riding a horse, explaining that she's outbreak free, which just means she doesn't have to tell her partners anymore .... and they, of course, can still contract it).
Some wonderful quotes:
"To learn more about our 24-hour prostitute phobia program, please call us at 1-800-828-7484 (+1-212-582-8880 from outside the USA) for a complimentary consultation to discuss the problem, or contact us using the form below."
"To add insult to an already distressing condition, most prostitute phobia therapies take months or years and sometimes even require the patient to be exposed repeatedly to their fear. We believe that not only is this totally unnecessary, it will often make the condition worse. And it is particularly cruel as prostitute phobia can be eliminated with the right methods and just 24 hours of commitment by the phobic individual." "If you are living with prostitute phobia, what is the real cost to your health, your career or school, and to your family life? Avoiding the issue indefinitely would mean resigning yourself to living in fear, missing out on priceless life experiences big and small, living a life that is just a shadow of what it will be when the problem is gone." "The Prostitute Phobia Clinic at The CTRN Phobia Clinicª is entirely results-focused, so we charge you for the result you want: freedom from prostitute phobia - regardless of how long it takes."So, I gotta wonder. How many people live in fear, and can't go to work / school, because they think the big-bad hooker is gonna get them?
HeadHunter
I got a call today from a fella named David Klein, over at
The Weatherly Group. Seems they are looking for an
Informix DBA in the New York City area, to be the lead on a migration to MS SQL, and wanted to know if I was interested. The job is full-time, and requires relocation -- so I'm not interested on either count. From the numbers he threw out, this is probably a job needing a 10+ year experienced admin, but I doubt they'll find anyone
[good] with more than 5-7 for the money they're offering.
I forgot to ask WHY they are migrating to MS SQL, because it's a pretty dreadful product.However, if you are interested ... or know someone who may be ... David can be reached here:
David [at] twgco.com
Kill-A-Watt
Late last week, I ordered a
Kill-A-Watt from
ThinkGeek to do a ROI cost-analysis on our refrigerator.
Our fridge is a hand-me-down from about 20 years ago, and it gave us a fit last week when I forgot to clean the coils. My fault, but it took it almost 24 hours to cool back down, and we lost some food out of it. During the ordeal, we weren't sure it was going to come back online -- and I had already been looking at new fridges. The theory is this:
- The existing fridge (18.1 cu. feet) is about 20+ years old. A new fridge would be more energy efficient.
- By purchasing a new fridge, I can cut down on our monthly expenses, which would yield a great ROI.
- Needed tools to test my theory.
The Kill-A-Watt arrived yesterday, and I plugged it in for an hour, at which point it told me that my fridge used 0.4 kW/h. Whipping out my calculator / phone, I managed to figure that there's 8760 hours in a year, and .4 * 8760 is 3504 kWh's per year. We pay (after taxes, etc...) a total of $397 / year to maintain power to our aging fridge.
I looked around on
HomeDepot (which we own stock in), and
Sams Club (which we own stock in, and adore), and found out that the maximum we'd want to spend would be around $1350 (which uses 452kW/year, and would cost us about $50 / year in electricity) and a minimum of $870 (which uses 686kW/year, and would cost us about $77 / year in electricity).
The ROI for the expensive fridge is 3.9 years (45 months), at which point we'd be saving $345 / year in electricity.
The ROI for the cheaper fridge is 2.7 years (33 months), at which point we'd be saving $320 / year in electricity.
I was hoping for an < 12 month ROI, but no such luck. Anyone have any suggestions?
Funding...
About two weeks ago, I got an email from a potential investor in the area, who's shaping up to be a decent mentor in some areas as well. We got together over lunch and discussed what he thought about our business venture, and what the technology could and could not be applied too.
Seems he thinks he can get a group of guys together, probably around 6 of them, who could each give us about $50,000 in exchange for some equity. He's ensuring me that these investors will likely not want any handholding (out of the ordinary), and can afford to lose some money for some time (ie, not looking for returns any time soon). A local angel investor group! And a real one! They're not wanting 70% of my company for $30,000!!!
So, now I just need to plot our musings / change of direction down on a piece of paper, and chart out the "newer" business plan so I can make another presentation.
System Back Up ... Laptop Woes
I've been getting a bit more "techy" than I'd like the last few posts ... but wanted to let you know that my development machine is back up and running
FC4, and working like a champ. Had some interesting issues installing it, but it works fine now.
Also managed to find out that my 6-year old
Viewsonic VA720 is going out, and may be the cause of many of my headaches. Time for another
Dell 2000FP (used, via eBay). Just don't see spending $900 on their new 2405FPW monitor.
The HP laptop that I have is doing a marvelous job running Windows, and seeing how I bought it at Sams Club, has a 90 day return policy. So far, so good. I'll probably wait until FC5 or SuSE 10 before I bother installing linux on it -- that just causes frustration right now.
CompUSA ... Part Deux
I met "Tommy" as soon as I walked in the door, who simply asked "What's wrong?". So, I explained that the laptop had problems X, Y, Z. My main concern was the video card. Here's why I'll never buy from
CompUSA again (paraphrased):
Tommy: "Oh, well, if I'd known you want to power an external monitor, I wouldn't have recommended this laptop."
Me: "Why?"
Tommy: "To get the external monitor to do 1600x1200, you need the native panel to also be able to do 1600x1200."
Me: "That doesn't make sense. You're saying that unless I have a LCD on the laptop which can do MORE than 1600x1200, it won't be able to do that on the external monitor? How come my last laptop, an eMachines, and the laptop before it, a Sager, ran at 1280x800 and 1400x1050, respectively, and they powered 1600x1200 or greater without problem."
Tommy: "Huh."
So, he kicked and screamed while I looked over the laptops. They didn't have anything new, so I asked for a refund.
Tommy: "I told you when you bought it, if it works, you'll only get store credit."
Me: "No, you told me if it did what it said it does, I'll get credit. It doesn't do what it says it does."
Tommy: "Hmm .... I can get a manager."
Me: "Have at it."
Ten minutes pass while Tommy brings up "Bob" to speed.
Bob: "There's a hidden partition on this laptop."
Me: "No. There's not. It's short 5GB."
Bob: "Well, that's how all of our systems will be."
Me: "So, none of your systems do what they say they will?"
Bob: Pause. "We have a Sony which can do 1920xsome_crazy_number. It's a 17" wide screen laptop, and runs $2799. They're in stock. That will do what you want it to."
Me: "Thanks, not spending $3,000 on a laptop."
Bob: Pause. "Well, then I can give you a store gift card."
Me: "Please read this sticker on the side of the laptop box. Outloud? What does it say?"
Bob: .... Reading for a minute .... "We don't follow that policy anymore. We follow what's on the receipt."
Me: "Really? Can you read the policy behind you on the wall? Outloud?"
Bob: .... Reading for a minute .... "We follow what's on the receipt."
Me: "Sounds like we're at an impass. You're telling me you won't follow your own return policys?"
Bob: "We follow what's on the receipt. Do you want to exchange the laptop, or return it?"
For your enlightenment, here's what's on the box and/or wall of the Lubbock CompUSA:
CompUSA Satisfaction Promise
At CompUSA, we believe in being fair to our customers. If you are not satisfied with a product you purchased from us and you return the product with the original receipt or invoice within 21 days of purchase or invoice date, you may exchange the product or receive a refund. If you do not have the original receipt, you may exchanged the unopened product for a CompUSA merchandise card. Items must be in new condition, with the original box, packaging, manuals, accessories, and UPC code. Opened software, games, and videos may only be exchanged for the same title.
Returns may be credited to a CompUSA merchandise card or, if you prefer, to the original credit card. Purchases made by cash or check over $250 will be refunded by a check from our corporate office within 10 business days.So, I gathered up my items and headed out the door. Phone call Numero Uno was to my lawyer. She says "Slam dunk Deceptive Trade Practice". But recommends that I first call the BBB, and the Attorney General's Consumer Division. Oh, and contact Visa, and corporate CompUSA.
Below is the response I got from corporate CompUSA:
Dear Mr. Presley, Thank you for contacting CompUSA. We consider you a valued customer and appreciate your taking the time to let us know what you think. We are sorry for the difficulty you have encountered; however, CompUSA's return policy, which is posted throughout our stores, on our website and printed on our sales receipts clearly states: In-Store Purchases (CompUSA Superstore & CompUSA Megastore locations) At CompUSA, we believe in being fair to our customers. If you are not satisfied with a product you purchased from us and you return the product with the original receipt or invoice within 21 days of purchase or invoice date, you may exchange the product or receive a refund, except as explained below. If you do not have the original receipt, you may exchange unopened product for a CompUSA merchandise card. Items must be in new condition, with the original box, packaging, manuals, accessories, and UPC code. Opened software, games, and videos may only be exchanged for the same title. Open notebook computers, projectors, and cameras may only be exchanged for a CompUSA merchandise card. Credit card refunds will be credited to the original credit card. Purchases made by cash or check over $250 will be refunded by a check from our corporate office within 10 business days. Our policy is governed by agreements with manufacturers in accordance with restrictions they have in place for product return and by the inclusion of standard warranties, which are included with most, if not all technology-related items. We advise consumers that if they experience any problem with a product, they can contact our service department for assistance or rely on their manufacturer's warranty and contact them directly to repair or exchange the product. Thank You, Customer Service CompUSA I was fuming for a few minutes, especially considering that I had two different return policies in my hand. One is what's on the receipt AND on the website. Another is what's on the laptop box AND on the store walls. Found out that I needed to file some paperwork w/ Visa to cancel the transaction, but actually stopped and pondered the amount of time that this ordeal was going take. My moral / ethical bell was ringing off the wall, but not worth it for $1700.
I did some calling around and found a customer that needed a few machines. They'll be getting them from CompUSA using my $1700 gift card. And when that's all said and done, CompUSA will never, ever get a single cent from me, my company, my relatives, or any of my clients. All they had to do was honor what they have plastered on their product. Instead, they just lost $50,000 a year in sales. Probably nothing major, I'm sure. But I hope to encourage others not to do business with them (not that
Best Buy is any better, mind you).
Today, I returned the products, and got a different manager, who had some smarts about him. He informed me that they were "behind" in making their changes on their stickers, and he knew it would cause (does cause) confusion. He apologized, but still stood behind the in-store credit only.
Two new machines will soon be on their way for free delivery via the CompUSA website. And then I've washed my hands of them.
CompUSA
I spent about a day trying to get the zv6008cl work with linux. Turns out that the video card and the memory card reader are poorly supported, and not at all under 64-bit linux. I was running out of time (I'm not very billable to our clients when I can't develop or manage advertising) ... and ran out to
CompUSA to see what they had.
I spent some time w/ a "Hardware Team Manager" named Tommy.
His name isn't really Tommy, but that's a-ok. He seemed knowledgeable enough, and I ended up picking out two laptops to go do some research (a Satellite A75 and a Satellite M45 model). I showed back up about two hours later and wanted to clarify before buying:
1. If it doesn't work, can I return it w/o a restocking fee?
Yes.2. Are you sure that I can return it w/o a restocking fee?
Yes.Tommy did clarify that if it didn't work, at all, then I would get a refund. If it just didn't work for ME, then I would get in-store credit. Fine.
I purchased up the A75, after reading some good things about it over at linux laptop. $1700 later, I was home w/ the Toshiba.
Off the bat, I noticed that across the box is a big sticker which says
"If you're not happy with your purchase, you may return it within 21 days for a full refund" -- optionally, I can have store credit. I'm very confused, but I'm pretty sure they have to take it back and give me the money back, if I'm not happy. It says so, very plainly on the box.
I was immediately
NOT happy with the laptop. The video is shared, and it's not changeable via the BIOS. 128MB always.
Toshiba says it's upgradeable to 2GB of RAM. It's really only 1.5GB ... minus the 128MB of shared video RAM. The hard drive literature says 100GB. I'm not going to split hairs over whether a GB is 1000MB or 1024MB, but the linux partitioner says there's only 95GB. That's 5% less than what's advertised. After fussing with the laptop for 48 hours, I couldn't get the
ATI video card [again] to work. The native driver (from ATI!) would not do more than 2048x2048 in resolution, and I need it to power itself (1280x800) and a 20" LCD (1600x1200) -- a total of 2880x2000. Windows, nor linux, were going to run on this system.
So, I packaged everything up, with my receipt in hand, and went back to say "Haylo" to the local CompUSA.
And things turned .... ugly.
Woes Of a Custom System
Monday night, horror struck. I mean, the worst kind -- the kind that strikes fear in most sys -admins.
I was using my linux desktop, which contains all of my pertinent data, when it decided to stop working. I right clicked to copy something, and gedit opened and the letter 'u' started going across the screen. I let it do this for about 1 minute before pressing backspace. Evolution (my email client), closed. I stopped and thought about it. I pressed the Esc key. Firefox opened. I pressed Ctrl-Alt-BkSpace to restart X. It closed out X-Windows, as it should.
So I stood there, thinking "should I restart?" or "should I make a recent backup?", or what? What could be so-wrong?
I changed the batteries on my wireless keyboard and mouse. Nothing worked. The mouse didn't move, the keyboard didn't respond. I couldn't switch virtual terminals. Yikes! So, I slowly reached down and hit the reset key, which got me two blank screens, and a spinning hard drive light. Word to the non-techies ... that's
BAD.
I turned it completely off for about 2 minutes, grabbed a Dr. Pepper, and turned it back on. The boot screen came up immediately, and it began running. It stared the network. It found the LVM volume groups. And then it had a problem running fsck.ext2 on one of the partitions. It sounds reasonable. Except, that my desktop is exclusively running the reiser file system.
There aren't any ext2 or ext3 partitions. It dropped me to a shell, after which I ran reiserfsck on all of my LVM volume groups (the system is raid 1'd, followed by LVM, followed by the necessary partitions) -- except my root file system. Everything was fine.
So, I restarted, and got the same error -- I could only assume that it was complaining about the root file system, which it was able to mount fine. So I grabbed a copy of Knoppix, a Fedora Core 3 rescue CD, and a linux image called sysrescue, [one
could think I've done this before] and started in.
Turns out, root partition does have the problem, and it's not able to fix it. Recommended running reiserfsck with --fix-fixable. So I ran that. Came out with still more problems. So, I ran it with --rebuild-trees. Worse idea, but had no choice. The system got about 20% done, and then croaked about being out of disk space. Ooops.
Hans Reiser, it would seem, implemented some checking on --rebuild-trees, which will mark the partition as un-readable until it successfully completes the rebuilding. Until that time, the partition is unusable. IE, rebooting it left me without my LVM or RAID, so I had to manually rebuild the raidtab to get RAID started, and then forced a check with LVM (which found my logical volumes and got them up and running).
At this point, the only thing to do was create a new partition, binary copy over the 2.5GB of data into a larger partition using dd, and then rebuild the trees. If that worked -- great, I have the recoverable data, but will need to build a new system to use it. But, my data was not on the root, it was on /home and /opt, which are different partitions, so I don't need to go through all of that hassle. But, I did need a new system to put my old data on.
At which point in time, I trucked over to my brand new HP zv6008cl, and started to put it through its paces ........
Fantastic Four .... Movies Still ... Suck
Saturday, we were all feeling a little under the weather. So, with a solid lunch under our belts, we decided to try and infect the rest of the town, and went to the afternoon showing of the Fantastic Four. I was quite excited, since we're Marvel stock owners, and fans of the comic book. The boys had no idea what we were going to see (as long as they could see "Fire Man!").
After paying $8 each (4 * $8 = $32), we went and got our seats. Mediocre seats (my recliner is nicer), but not bad. Christian decided that then was a good time to get some drinks. He wanted Coke. I wanted less sugar for him. Blaze wanted Fruit Punch. Christian wanted Fruit Punch. Steph wanted Raisenettes. I wanted to save some money. We settled on two drinks (Sprite and Fruit Punch), and a box of candy.
Blaze stayed with Steph, and I headed with Christian to the lines. Our theatre has 3 concession areas. The main one holds 10 lines, in total. On either side of the theatre is another one, which each hold 4 lines / cash registers. How many are open, on a Saturday afternoon? Eight lines, in total. Neither side concession stand was open.
Christian and I got in line behind a rather jovial lady and her child, and then waited. I counted .... there were 19 people behind the counter. It worked a bit like this:
- Each cash register had at least two people.
- Customer places the order. Person one behind the counter presses the appropriate button.
- Person two begins running around like crazy, filling drinks, getting pickles and popcorn.
- Person one taps their fingers.
- Person two is filing drinks, and getting pickles (probably got the popcorn).
- Customer remembers nachos.
- Person one adds that by pressing one button, and yelling at person two.
- Person two runs around some more. Fetches the nachos.
- Person one stands and stares. Dreams of becoming a manager.
- Person two finishes getting together the items, places them into a convenient carry holder.
- Customer pays.
- Person one gives the customer change.
- Next customer is up.
Total time spent by person one doing something: 20 seconds
Total time spent by person two doing something: 8 minutes
Behind all of this was a manager, wearing a suit! He was yelling at the high school kids to get popcorn and pickles faster. Doesn't seem like they're doing something right.
I ordered 2 medium drinks, and 1 candy box. Total spent? $9.75. That's a dinner for all of us at Taco Bell.
The movie started at 4:30pm. We were in line at 4:15pm. I caught the last trailer when we got back to our seats at 4:45pm.
The movie was great ... I enjoyed it. But, do movie theaters really wonder why people don't go much?
Movies ... Suck
Friday we made the decision to drop
Netflix. Yes. That's what I said. Dropping Netflix. I know that next to the
TiVO, everyone online seems to think Netflix is the darling of the movie rental industry. I disagree.
About six months ago, Steph and I took the plunge and signed up for the $21.99 (3 movies at a time) program. We then happily filed up the queue, and let the movies role in. Things were rocky the first few weeks, but once we got a system down, we were maximizing our viewing time, have the movies out the door, and were (im)patiently waiting on the next round.
However, over the past few weeks we have noticed that it's taking longer and longer to get movies to Netflix, and back again. Last Tuesday, we mailed three movies to them. I just recently (today, Monday the following week), was notified that they have the movies in hand. That's 5 days to get there. And 5 days to get back. By my calculations, if we watch all three movies the day we get them, we'll get to watch 3 movies * 3 times per month (30 days in a month / 10 days round trip). That's 9 movies. Thanks, but no.
Turns out, our local
Hollywood Video has a MVP program where we can rent the same items we can on Netflix (I'm sure they don't have all of the oddities that Netflix does, but, well, we don't watch those anyway) -- for $9.99. Yes, we have to wait 6 - 8 weeks for new releases, but that's ok w/ us. We joined on Saturday, and we've already rented about 8 movies [Steph's been ill, and we caught up on everything in our Netflix queue!].
