An interesting point on Google, and the whole 'Google Style Economy', which is from a guy whose name I'm blanking on so I can't give appropriate credit, is that Google's economy is one of zero obligation to the customer. If you never charge customers for things, you have no obligations to them, other than whatever minimums can be forced by law. If you make your money selling information about or targeting ads (for money) towards your 'customers', you can avoid ever actually selling things to your customers. If you don't sell them anything, they have no financial leverage over you other than to quit using your free services (which provide that information based revenue stream), and how likely is it that all those folks are going to do that and start paying someone for those services instead?
The only folks who have any financial leverage over Google are the companies that pay for ads, and they aren't in the business of protecting our rights against big data, or enforcing big data's obligations to us. That would in fact be against their interests to do so (at least in the first order business sense, obviously they themselves are also part of that information revenue stream in most cases as individuals.)
And of course this is forcing our digital economy more and more in that direction, because it becomes harder and harder to sell an actual product. You have to instead give away the product as a means to sell a service. Microsoft has been pushed this way relentlessly in order to compete. Windows is becoming a service, not a product. Eventually, they'll probably try to make it a pure service (i.e. cloud based) I'm guessing, because all of the pressures are lining up in that direction against them. Thankfully I'll either be dead or struggling to eat oatmeal by then.That's why Windows now hectors you constantly about Azure and Microsoft's cloud services. Google'ism has forced them in this direction.
If you want to get big VC capital these days for a software oriented project, I'm guessing if you don't demonstrate some way in which you are going to A) create a permanent dependence of your customers on your services and hence an ongoing revenue streams by making it a service and B) have some means to gather lots of data that can be used to your advantages, that you probably have a long row to hoe if you are talking about trying to sell an actual product.
Of course the loose morals of the buying public haven't helped on this front. You can't steal a service like you can a piece of software. Well, not nearly so easily anyway. If you give away the software, it can't be stolen, it's only a means by which you encourage people to use your service.
Being completely hunkered down in DeanWorld for decades I never really understood how things like Microsoft's Azure had changed things. You can sign up, stick in your credit card, self-configure a system, have it up and running in an hour, add more power to it as you go. So it becomes almost frictionless to just set up some service based system and see if it works. If it doesn't, delete the virtual machine, and go try something else. You never sold anything to your customers so there is no obligation for ongoing support or availability. They were paying for a service for a short period of time. Once that time is out, you have no obligation to them. So wait till the end of the month, don't renew any subscriptions, and shut it down.
