zlacker

>>i13e+(OP)
It is depressing that people dont recognize that Google has invented and perfected a parasitic business model that has destroyed the internet (and much of tech with it) and this episode feels like just another turn of the downward spiral.

The article aims to offer a preliminary analysis of whether Microsoft can become a better parasite: Grabbing the content people generate online, paying nothing, and using it deftly to serve advertisement on the basis of private behavioral traits that are gleaned by prying open and subverting the use of all pieces of IT people use.

It is not too difficult by now to imagine alternate tech universes (Philip K Dick style) that have nothing to do with this nightmare, where more or less the same technologies empower individuals and companies and organizations rather than squeezing them dry. The combination of oligopoly status, moral laxity and political dysfunction means we are simply sitting around like sheep discussing whether a new butcher is about to get sharper knives.

>>colleg+Dw1
> It is depressing that people dont recognize that Google has invented and perfected a parasitic business model ... The article aims to offer a preliminary analysis of whether Microsoft can become a better parasite

In this model, are end users who use it to search for information parasites as well? After all, they are consuming content that other people generate online, and usually pay nothing for it. And they love to look for — and find — what they are interested in. If Google didn't satisfy that need well, people wouldn't have preferred it, and it wouldn't have grown.

>>azangr+dz1
> usually pay nothing for it

Users pay with their data. That is the whole point of the business model and it is obviously lucrative enough so that the entire tech infrastructure (devices, OS, browsers etc) can be repurposed to be a user data collection channel. If you want to find a real accomplice that is essential for the model to work, it is not the users, it is the advertisers. It takes two to tango in the adtech market.

I don't dispute that search (in its various incarnations) is an essential service in a digitally interconnected world. There are countless ways to pay for it (as a digital public good, as a user subscription etc) that are fundamentally better than what we have. It is also obviously true that some decades ago Google innovated technically. A lot happened since and it wasn't positive. Normalizing it simply prolongs the agony.

>>colleg+pC1
Most user data is not worth anywhere near enough to keep the "entire tech infrastructure" running.

User attention is worth more but even then I would be hesitant to say such a grand claim.