How do you pay for your PC?
To Dad… you weren’t following it, because why would you? But, if you’re curious, the Rumble in the Judiciary is over. The DOJ won. Google lost. Congrats, the price of your next Asus just went up.
Just after Google lost, Lee-Anne Mulholland — Google’s VP of regulatory affairs, wrote this, “We’ve invested billions of dollars in Chrome and Android. Breaking them off would change their business models, raise the cost of devices.”
Are you having flashbacks of the Abe Simpson shaking-fist meme? Yeah, me too.
As someone who’s happy to not use Google, I searched Amazon :-).
A brand-spanking new Asus Chromebook is $68.99. The cheapest new Asus Windows Laptop is $224.99. And, you’d have to pay another hundred bucks for Office.
I posted a version of this to LinkedIn. Where, minutes later, a person who hates Google far more than I do replied with full-on snark, “Maybe that’s because Microsoft doesn’t offset computers by showing people ads.”
That got me thinking. Am I happier to spend less than $70 on a Chromebook because Google subsidizes it because they show me ads OR am I more happy spending three times more for Microsoft’s machine?
Before I answered myself, I noticed that Microsoft made $49B in ad revenue in the last twelve months. And, unlike Google, who I don’t like, MS didn’t subsidize my Windows PC. For that matter, Apple didn’t offset my iPhone and they made $10B on ads last year.
In their own monopolistic way, Google behaves like an old school filler-up-station. Say, Exxon Mobil, a child of another broken monopolist home (Standard Oil). You fill up there and pay with their card, they give you a few cents back per gallon. Or, maybe, if you’re lucky, a Flintstones Pebbles drinking glass. For all the hate dumped on Google, at least they have a loyalty program.
Do you prefer to pay for your PC with cash or with your ad attention? Yeah, me too.