The end of ownership

[supergee]

Taking a lesson from the producers of DRM books, Google is shutting down products it sold us and is tired of supporting

Thanx to andrewducker

Comments

[arlie]

Just from your summary, their behaviour seems consistent with my experiences with other software companies. First you get forced updates that push bugs on users who don't want to be early adopters, then forced updates that change the UI drastically, and finally forced upgrades that increase the minimum hardware requirements. All in the name of allowing the provider to only need to support one version, while claiming in public that the purpose is to provide critical security fixes.

And as for google, I'm still looking for a podcast player I like as much as Google Listen, which they killed years ago. That was free, of course, but clearly they've learned that people are OK with moving on to the next "great" thing, except for a few techie dinos whose business they don't care about. They've also got a history of forced updates that change behaviour drastically, in part because they routinely reenable unwanted features the user had turned off. And then there's the model of the Android phone - heavily integrated with google features they've been making harder and harder to use - such as gmail, and the associated contacts. Gmail is NOT "free" from my POV - it's part of my android phone, which I paid rather more for than I've paid for most software. (And the one I bought most recently was a Nexus, so guess which company was my supplier.)