Market power and product design. The infuriating case of Android Chrome News Discovery
In which I vent my anger at how Google shareholder interests make it harder for me to be productive, to understand the world around me, and to be a useful node of knowledge-exchange
Give credit where it's due - the "Discover" feature on Google's Android version of Chrome default homescreen when you open a new tab is truly excellent. Google has used all the data it has about my web browsing habits to offer me an excellent smorgasbord of reading. It has dialled into my interests and gives me an eclectic mix of sources that nowhere else gets close to. I check it a few times a day. Not as often as the FT, but more often than any other news source.
A video of me scrolling through the News Discover tab this morning.
So this is an example of Google using the vast amount of data it has about my web habits and creating a really interesting and useful news feed for me. Some of its sources border on the creepy - eg I had never been specially interested in news about the UK's Sikh community, but found myself reading what I thought was a pretty private piece of text - albeit within the Google ecosystem - about Sikhs in the UK ... and lo and behold, I now have news stories about Sikh community issues. I have long got somewhat used to Google's Big Brother nature, and even if they sometimes surprise me, I might as well enjoy what upsides there are. (That said, I am surprised that no one else offers this service - a really good, eclectic set of reading based on my preference-revealed interests. The Firefox recommendations delivered by Reader just don't do it.)
But the absence of good alternative recommendations engines is not the focus of my gripe today. Instead, I want to talk about the degree to which Google shareholder interests have got in the way of making this information resource a really useful part of my working life. In product design detail after product design detail, I see Google exercising its market power in this product. It puts me in a state that reminds me of how angry I used to feel about what Facebook had done to make its once attractive newsfeed addictive
Gripe 1
Those excellent recommended articles need to enter my usual worflow. Many are good. So I need to put them into my filing system. (Still mostly based, for web stuff, off the continuingly - if that is a word - excellent and focused bookmarking service, diigo.com). Well... that means that I need to open these articles on my laptop browser, because ... another sub-gripe ... Chrome on android does not support a plug-in eco-system. Obviously it doesn't, because otherwise browser plug-ins would rival the app-store. Already shareholders there exercising their market power to the detriment of productivity ... that's a bigger gripe for anotehr day.
I want to open this nice Google discover product on my laptop. But guess what... it is not available except on the phone. You might think that the sprawling empire of Google News would have a tab that simply did the same as the opening page on the Android Chrome. It doesn't. A few of the stories from the one re-appear on the other ... but Showcase is obviously designed with another objective function - and there is nothing as good or as rich in source-discovery as the Android Discovery screen. (By the way, I will write one day what I believe the Google shareholder is doing with Showcase and why that makes it such a poor product for the news consumer).
Gripe 2
OK. So I will need to start the journey of turning this interesting material into usable knowledge on my phone. There is a feature there called "Add to Reading List". That sounds fine. I will save what I think might be re-usable, find that Reading List on my desktop, and I will be back in a familiar & productive work environment.
I am - for most browsing - a Firefox user. No problem, I think. The Reading List appears to be a sub-folder of Bookmarks - that is how it appears in the Chrome desktop menu structure. So it will be a bit convoluted, but I can still do it - I need to sync a desktop Chrome across devices then have Firefox open the Chrome bookmarks file. The quality of the feed is worth it. I can do it.
Except ... here goes ... the Reading List looks like it is part of Bookmarks, one of the inter-operable features of most browsers ... but it is not. When you sync across devices, your bookmarks are copied locally, but the Reading List stays firmly inaccessible to other products on Google's servers.
Gripe 3
So, to summarise: Google has produced a good news discovery product; I want to integrate it into my workflow ... and I discover that the only plausible way to do this is to switch my work browser from Firefox to Chrome.
This, I fear, is how market power works. In a world where Google is not dominant, two things might happen. First, others would be in a position to offer the kind of "discovery" product Google has made so well. Second, the layers of proprietary, non-standards-based solutions that Google relies on here would have to fend for themselves in a world of choice. Imagine a start-up pitching the follwing idea:
We have this great content-discovery product. And our business model is that any advanced user who wants to take full advantage of it will need to download our browser and make it their default for serious work... and once it was the default, it would own all those other default choices and data-gathering powers.
Obviously, the start-up would be quietly taken aside and told that however good their product, their business model made no sense. No consumer would do what they proposed. And yet, Google can do exactly that. Carefully craft a handful of features, of sludge, such that billions of individually miniscule and rational decisions, push to make a Chrome browser choice just a bit easier ... and indeed, making Chrome on Android a better product than Chrome in environments that Google does not fully control, like the desktop.
So there we have it. Google's shareholders continue to make me, and billions of others, less productive, angrier and more and more their servants.
You might think that I exaggerate the harm. Of course, the world will survive my not being able to remember or refer to a really good article about such and such. I won't be able to pass the reading on to someone who might find it useful; it won't be in my filing system, and so I am more likely to forget it, etc. The world will definitely get over the harm to my work-day. But now aggregate this over billions of people. We are all less productive and less useful to others because of the interests of Google's shareholders. That, I would say, adds up to real harm.
And you might think that I am jolly lucky to have these wonderful "free" products at all, and if the shareholders find their returns in a bit of product sludge, so be it. Well ... first - I am not sure if this still has to be said - the products are not free. We pay for them out of the increased price of advertising baked into all our goods these days. Second, if it is a valuable product for me, there are probably millions of others in the world for whom it will be too, and others should be able to make a living providing it - if they had the right sort of access to data and to screens, both of which are in different ways monopolised by Google. In a competitive market, I would get the product without the sludge. In other words - this product is a small silver lining, only, and what it really does is point to a counterfactual in which more and better is available if only we had the ability to stand up to the Google shareholder.
Someone remind me why we let this sort of stuff happen.