Om Malik on Google Keep: Dance with the one who brung you.

There's some interesting back-and-forth in the tech press between Om Malik and Marco Arment, about Google Keep.


Clipped from: gigaom.com (share this clip)

Malik's passionate original post states:

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Google may think it can waltz into a market that Evernote and others have staked out, but I’m not going to dance.
From gigaom.com

After seven years on Google Reader went up in smoke, Malik doesn't trust Google to keep an app alive.

Arment, the creator of Instapaper and co-creator of Tumblr, says it's a sucker's game to trust a free service and users shouldn't be caught flat-footed when an app they've invested time in is killed.

Investing too heavily in someone else’s proprietary system for too long rarely ends gracefully, but when it bites us, we have nobody to blame but ourselves.
From www.marco.org

 

Arment points out all the dangers of a proprietary monoculture, while Malik enumerates the reasons not to trust Google.

I don’t trust Google to introduce new apps and keep them around, because despite what the company says, these apps are not their main business. Their main business is advertising and search — regardless of whatever nonsense you might read. They will sacrifice anything and everything to keep those businesses intact. Sure, they embraced mobile advertising and mobile search, but that’s just the same business on a different device.
From gigaom.com

Google isn't in the curation business- it's in the selling search data business.

(Google is also not in the cyborg visor business, despite what you may have heard lately- they're in the collecting-search-data-from-your-cyborg-visor-t0-sell-to-advertisers business.) When you're shopping for a product, it's not a bad idea to get it from a company whose product is that product.

It's also not a bad idea to pay for it. My Hotmail account may be "like a piece of spinach stuck to your teeth from 1997" according to a friend of mine, but they can't take it away from me this year at least- it's paid for.