[1]

According to ABC News (& Daniel Roth, Wired Magazine senior writer):

Now Google offers free versions of the things Microsoft wants you to buy, such as e-mail, calendars and word processing.

“Google has the same things. They offer them up for free, and they’re getting better all the time,” Wired Magazine senior writer Daniel Roth said.

What is “free”?

Thanks, BTW, to [2] Kara Swisher’s post linking to the [3] ABC News Story (actually the title of this post is derived from a comment by the story’s author, Gigi Stone).

People tell me Google’s apps are “free”. I say: Yeah, right — have you never heard of the term “ad-supported”? Google mines the data it stores about its users, and then sells the users to its advertisers. So does Facebook. And now (well, as of about a week or so) so does Yahoo. Does Microsoft do this too? Well, it isn’t exactly impossible.

Does “free” = “social”?

So each of these companies have “social platforms” — the basis of these “societies” is: Get freebie software applications in exchange for eyeballs. So you can expect each of these companies to say that their application is better than the other guys’ so you should use only the “winner application”. Does anyone really believe that?

What about the ads?

What I want to know is: Do advertisers really target a different audiences when they run their ads on Google Mail, Yahoo Mail or Microsoft Mail? If a Yahoo Mail user forwards a mail received from a Microsoft Mail account to a Google Mail account, would all 3 people see the exact same advertisements? Why or why not? My guess is that the reason why anyone sees any particular ad (though no one will probably [4] actually see the ad) has more to do with the ad inventory of the company (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft) than with any aspect of the user.

Maybe I’m wrong

Maybe members of the “Google Community” are different than members of the “Microsoft Community” — and maybe of the “Yahoo Community” are yet again different then either the “Google Community” or the “Microsoft Community”. If so, then please explain it to me — ’cause I really want to know: who are you?!?