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Google, Urchin & Real Biddness…

November 15, 2005

Awhile back, I mentioned that Google had bought (high-dollar) analytics provider Urchin, but apparently some of their customers couldn’t get anyone at Google interested in taking their money to renew their license…

Well, I guess that wasn’t too surprising, since they were apparently planning on giving it away for free all along.

Apparently Free is the new Profit…

Or owning all of the metadata of everyone on the ‘net is worth giving a bunch of stuff away to get it (which it probably is)…

I signed up yesterday, figuring that since my Google traffic took a hit in the last update I might as well let them count how much traffic they’re not sending me.

Unfortunately, it looks like they’ve been so deluged in new signups that they’ve yet to report any results for anyone…

Apparently the hallmark of a Web 2.0 Planned Economy is that on the same day that no hits are delivered and thus no advertising revenue generated, no stats will be available as well.

lol…

Then of course, there are the people who have been paying $200 or more a month for Urchin that are not too pleased to find that the service is now not only free, it’s swamped and they can’t get their reports.

Right now, I feel like Google doesn’t care about me enough as a customer to tell me that they’re changing a product I pay for. They don’t care enough about me as a customer to make sure that my login doesn’t change, or that they at least ask or warn me before changing my login. They don’t care enough about me as a customer to make sure that the re-launch of their product doesn’t dramatically impact the people who are already paying them lots of money.

Ahem.

I think when they told you (implicitly) that they don’t want your money anymore, that pretty much nailed how much they care about you as a customer — failure to provide a working product that they no longer charge for was just the cherry on top.

(via Blogniscient)

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Written by Chuck Lawson · Filed Under Media 
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