Technology people fucking love Google. If any company is going to take us into the future it's going to be Google. You can basically guarantee that almost* anything they put their effort into will be shaken to its core and innovated.
* Social media notwithstanding
So why not just throw in our lot with the Googs? Clearly they are the tech dynamo end all and be all, and basically can do no wrong.
What do we see when a company finally hits critical mass? There's always contraction and what appears to be calcification; companies lose relevance. We've seen it with countless other institutions, right now basically every cell phone company in the world at one time or another offered unlimited data plans for a large sum. As prices went down2, our options to even have it dried up! I have an unlimited data plan because I was grandfathered in with my last contract but now if I upgrade I'll have to choose a plan that costs the same amount as my current one, but no longer offers unlimited data.
Forget that, unlimited texting costs me almost half my phone bill each month when the actual cost of sending and receiving a text is 140 bytes3. How much does a voice call cost? That information isn't freely available from phone companies but Skype, a leader in VOIP, claims you need 30kb per second4 just to maintain a call at low quality. As a point of reference, one kilobyte is equal to 1024 bytes. So you would have to send 219 text messages to equal 1 second of a voice call, and yet the price difference for these two plans is negligible. Ho-hum.
We are in a country where it pays to be lazy and mysterious. Telecoms want you to pay huge premiums on newer technologies even if those technologies are a hundred times more cost effective then anything else they offer. The United States infrastructure in third-world in quality and despite making hundreds of millions of dollars these companies are doing nothing to help you. Oh wait, Time Warner bumped a lower tier's internet speed up by 5mbps to 15mbps for free. They also started making people pay a surcharge of $5 to lease their modems, a service that has been free for the last 10 years.
Google is currently offering Google Fiber in small areas as a way of threatening these other companies with competition. Google's internet is a Gigabit upload download for $70 a month or free for life for a one-time construction fee of $300. If you'd like to compare Time Warner, we'd do the unit conversion of 1 gigabit = 128 mbs. Yes, you read that right. No, I didn't fuck up the math.
There is a sad thing that seems to happen when it comes to companies now, people think that no matter what you do you're a shill for them or you have some kind of vested interest in their well-being that supports a little fervor.
This post is no different. I'm definitely a shill for Google. But it you're going to be a shill for any company, let it be one that threatens you with innovation instead of stifling our progress.
1http://stopthecap.com/2012/11/05/time-warner-cable-will-increase-standard-broadband-speed-to-151mbps-nationwide/
2http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/capping_the_nation_s_broadband_future
3http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_messaging
4https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA1417/how-much-bandwidth-does-skype-need
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