Corporate Indifference to Humanity

This is inexcusable:

In a post on the official Google Nest Community page, Google announced it is shutting down the service for several old Nest smart home products. Most of these have not been for sale for years, but since this is all hardware tied to the cloud, turning off the servers will turn them into useless bricks.
— Ars Technica

Appropriately, the comments are scathing:

Google has been a farce for years now but it doesn’t seem funny anymore as the shutdowns continue and people loose their investments in money and time when they have to replace things they’re accustomed to using. It’s despicable and sad. I wonder when I’ll lose Waze. It’s a wonderful service but at least I haven’t had to pay for it.

I will NEVER buy or buy into another Google product. I have never recovered from them killing Picasa.

The whole industry is happy to screw us over – five year old S series Samsung phone – still another 5 years life – but no software updates so security software won’t play.

I bought my Nest cameras before Google snapped them up, so what are ya gonna do. When I replace them, it sure isn’t going to be something that depends on some cloud service to keep operating.

I guess this is another good lesson in, “don’t buy into any Google tech that depends on Google maintaining it.” Yes, PCs of course eventually lose support, but you can still use the PC after for plenty of tasks (not even including installing another OS like Linux, etc.)

My rough estimate from my own personal experience for these things has been I get about 2-3 years out of Amazon and Google products, 3-5 years out of Windows/PC products, and about 6-8 years out of Apple products. Mileage will vary based on use case, but in my opinion there’s very good reason to not buy Amazon and Google branded products.

As I’m sure has been stated numerous times (and will be numerous more after this post), this is what happens when you buy devices which only work when connected to a cloud server.

Why did google spend half a billion to buy a company to then just kill the product line. That is no different than taking half a billion and burning the pile of money like the joker.

We reached a point not that corporarions would rather burn money than pay it in dividends instead or reward workers by spreading the half a billion amongst the employees?

what is the reason for this?

Good question!

Pretty sad:

Allie and Steve, who asked to go by their first names only but whose identities are known by Insider, had both relocated to California when Allie started working for the tech giant six years ago. Steve began working at the company around two years later.

The couple, who were high school sweethearts, had their first child in fall 2022. Allie went on parental leave shortly before, and planned to be off for around eight months in total. Steve took two months of parental leave in late 2022, and was set to take a further two from March.

Google announced Friday that it would lay off around 12,000 employees, or roughly 6% of its workforce. Allie and Steve were among those affected, they told Insider. Both found out that they were being laid off at the same time.

Furthermore:

Google employees have expressed their shock at the abrupt and impersonal nature of the layoffs, which happened over email. Some managers weren’t even informed of the mass terminations before they happened.

Gotta love how “human resources” works at a big, faceless corporation!

Google is of course wealthy enough that it doesn’t have to lay off employees. It is choosing to. Those layoffs will be costly, and not just in a financial sense – they’ll be disruptive to a lot of lives.

But to Sundar Pichai and Google executives, it’s all apparently just numbers on a screen.

Category: Corporate Indifference to Humanity

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