They’ve lost the war. As soon as this all rolled out I started looking for an alternative. It isn’t so much that they lost one customer, but they’ve created an environment where they will lose customers. Silly mistake. All they had to do was nothing and they would have kept me as a customer. But once again they felt the need to learn the most important lesson in tech. If it ain’t broke don’t fucking fix it.

Firefox anyone?

Just as with piracy I always wonder what percentage of the market really uses blockers, how relevant that segment truly is, and how much of it can be regained by simply improving service quality.

For example when it comes to ads I often see unhealthy lifestyle ads such as fast food. Or those money grab mobile games I wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole. I honestly wouldn’t mind being served a trailer for baldur’s gate, or an ad for a local restaurant.

Furthermore it’s not that I wouldn’t pay for something like YouTube. But it’s just that I have no choice as a customer in what service to use and it feels forced. YouTube is the only choice for many things. Google has an unfavorable privacy license and so I prefer to avoid them altogether.

So in my eyes it’s a service issue. It’s like they are mopping with an open faucet. It’s just a waste of resources.

This is a lot like the Reddit issues. You would think that most people would take umbrage to being treated like this by a company, but alas, most people don’t care, aren’t technical enough, or have become too invested in a company to want/need to change.

Companies like Google know this, and it makes me wonder if the ‘don’t be evil’ thing was ever real, or it was simply a bait & switch catchphrase to get them to the point where they were big enough to no longer care what people thought.