Technology

There is a small sliver of Google that wants you as a customer. Maybe that’s the sliver that makes the Pixel line, but Pixel phones are not Google’s business, Google’s business is acquiring your information and selling it or leveraging it to increase ad revenue. Google is not a hardware company, though they sell hardware. Google is not an entertainment company, though they will sell you movies and music. Google is not a consumer software company, though they do provide software and services targeted at consumers and businesses. Google is an advertising company. If you buy hardware from them, and you like it, that’s great, but they are less concerned about your experience as an end-user than they are about acquiring your data to further their ad sales. If making a quality experience for you as a user Improves the likelihood of acquiring more data, they improve the quality of your experience. But if an improved experience hampers their ability to acquire more revenue through ad sales, they will hamper your experience or shut down a product that isn’t directly increasing their data collection and add sales. See: rolling everything content related into the YouTube brand and increasingly hampering the experience of those who use ad blockers or privacy focused browsers.

You may consider yourself a customer of Google, but until you’re giving them millions of dollars every quarter, you are just a user. Google’s profits from every hardware device they’ve ever sold is just a rounding error on a single quarter of the massive amounts of money they make selling ads.