curtislaraque:
I just read one of the most tone-deaf critiques coming out of Google I/O so far.
PropertyOfZack posted a response from producer and author Jesse Cannon following the launch of Google Play Music All Access. Beyond being critical, the early review of the service was full of…
First, off I really appreciate the pushback to my opinion’s, it’s very important to get a discourse going about these issues so that everyone can see other perspectives on these subjects. With that said, implying I am tone deaf to what I saw I think is a bit ridiculous. Instead, I would counter by saying it seems you bought the hype of a charismatic presentation.
Your first point—that isn’t just a name-calling jab—is that because Google+ has 190 million users it isn’t a failure. This is more of Google’s bullshit spin. They essentially rope Gmail users into having to occasionally click on the site and drive up their numbers here’s a real fact— Google+
doesn’t have 1 percent of the time spent on the site that Facebook or Twitter have. Getting people to accidentally click a page or occasionally update their SEO or blog settings isn’t a success, success is getting your service to be a part of people’s lives. Google+ has failed at this.
As well the characterization that because I didn’t adress the fact that Google will increase their price isn’t “insightful critique” is pretty ridiculous. I discussed what I see as reasons, one may want to use the service. That’s a reason, even if Google will drop it in about 6 weeks. You also argue that this isn’t a move Google isn’t doing just because they can, while pretty much making my argument for me. They want to unite their services but by doing that they’ve made a lackluster product that does nearly nothing new.
It is then argued that Google’s All Access “touches on all the areas of the digital music experience we care about: radio, playlists, recommendation, cloud streaming, cloud storage, local storage, and purchasing (though purchases do take you to the Play Store), in a way that no existing service does currently. ”
Spotify, MOG and Rdio all do all of these services except one which is cloud storage. Which you are correct, I missed that part of the story. But to me that seems to be a minimal feature. But the rest of those services can be done on most of the other services (another exception is Spotify doesn’t allow purchases, but Rdio does), but to characterize this service as something no other service does is more Google hype. It has tiny, tiny feature tweaks, I feel barely help it be anything more than a lackluster product, especially in comparison to Spotify and all the Apps they have that can do far better and more interesting recommendations (see thisismyjam or BandsInTown)
You say:
“The radio feature was announced as “radio without rules,” a concept that is clearly highlighted for its uniqueness among the competition, and relies heavily on Play’s new levels of integration. While it’s very interesting that Google allows you to skip though as many songs as you want, as often as you want, in a radio station, even more intriguing is the customization that’s possible. Services like Spotify and Pandora are somewhat prohibitively skeuomorphic in their user experience design: just like a classic radio, they don’t tell you what’s next, and you can’t change what you’re going to hear, except in the (limited) linear fashion of skipping. With All Access, you can view upcoming songs in a radio station like a playlist, and rearrange or even remove songs from the queue. Definitely a competitive feature, and one that shows a focus on user experience.
More Google Hype! Have you tried this yet? Yes it is great that you can rearrange the order of what plays next but both MOG and Rdio have similar radio functions. I can never, ever defend Spotify’s user experience, but that is precisely why I don’t use it. It’s great that Google will harvest information about your listening needs, but yet again this has been tried by so many other services, I have very little faith that they will crack the code, the only person who has come close to cracking this is Pandora and until you get into the hard work of really distinguishing characteristics of music, I dont think recommendation radio is going to be rewarding for you, even if you can re-order the poor recommendations the service makes. I would love to be wrong about this but years of observing and testing these services ha led me to believe this isn’t the way to go down, just ask the many failures in this environment that haven happened so far.
The rest of your argument centers around faith that Google is good at what they do and being impressed with a charismatic speech and faith in them. I think that is the core difference in how we see this. Not facts, but faith. I have none, you have a lot. None of this is fact. Almost like an Atheist arguing with a Christian. I have zero faith that this service is anything special and will be just like Google’s other music endeavors, nothing that anyone really cares about. If you think a service that does basic functions, lacks an app environment or any of the interaction Daisy seems poised to employ will be the least bit disruptive. But I would love to be wrong, I just don’t see it happening
