Google To Devs: Use Our Payment System Or Be Dropped 305
Meshach writes "Google has been pressuring applications and mobile game developers to use its costlier in-house payment service, Google Wallet for quite some time. Now Google warned several developers in recent months that if they continued to use other payment methods — such as PayPal, Zong and Boku — their apps would be removed from Google Play. The move is seen as a way to cut costs for Google by using their own system."
Google's payment options (Score:5, Interesting)
For all the good that Google is supposedly trying to do, this begs a question I've been wondering for quite a while.
Why don't they implement a Payment API for developers? People could then use all sorts of services, from PayPal to BitCoin to pay to Google, and be paid by them. Google doesn't implement all the extant services out there because if it implemented a few of them, it would be considered responsible for implementing all of them. But it would make sense to enable developers to do so, and customers to use them.
Or so it seemed. They appear to be more interested in restricting payment types in order to increase their margins. If this is so, it will diminish their user-base as this sort of thing comes out. Granted, they've found innovative economies of scale that have allowed them to do things it would be difficult for others to do as cheaply - which appears to be something they're now leveraging to put unfair leverage on the marketplace. A lack of effective competition becomes a monopolization.
Re:Not everyone can use it (Score:4, Interesting)
And Bill Gates is more and more a hero (Score:5, Interesting)
The Bill Gates/MS icon on Slashdot (is/was) that of a borg version of the Dorky One... the idea being that MS wanted to assimilate you into the collective. Turns out it was a hippy collective indeed with about as many rules as Fight Club with no enforcement.
It has often been remarked that MS dominance was obtained not so much through the success of MS but through the failure of everyone else. Read Apple, IBM and the various home computer makers whose names are lost in the mists of time only remembered by the senile elders.
And through their failure, we gained the Wintel platform which now turns out to have been insanely open. Imagine MS telling Windows developers how to collect payment, if at all. Does MS tell Blizzard how to collect its pound of flesh of the enslaved? How shareware should be payed for?
Does MS dictate which version of MS you should run on Dell hardware? Does Dell stop you from upgrading the OS?
It is not as if MS never tried but it failed so often nobody took them to serious and so the evil that might have happened, never happened. It is like a brutal dictator whose brutality ends up as a kind of cute outburst with throwing chairs instead of the millions dead with efficient dictators. A dictator who fails at being terrible sounds a lot better then a dictator who succeeds... and Apple and Google are certainly trying hard enough.
It is kinda sad that companies keep trying to get total control when the PC did so well without it.
I can see upsides to this (Score:4, Interesting)
For one, any in-app purchases made will be tied to your account now. I've seen people lose out on DLC-type purchases they'd made because they switched to a new phone, and the developer of the program used a different payment service. Hopefully this will keep that from happening in the future.
Re:Google Wallet vs PayPal (Score:4, Interesting)
PayPal is in the middle of their third class-action lawsuit for making it easy to start using their service, then freezing your account, demanding all sorts of identifying info they'd never said up-front they'd need (a utility bill that "must be in your name"? I don't get one.) and demanding that you justify to them all the transactions you've been involved with. Meanwhile, they're earning interest off of all the funds that have been frozen.
A California court ruled ages ago that they cannot include the term in their EULA stipulating that customers agree not to have access to a real court, and must instead seek resolution through an internal Dispute Resolution Team comprised of PayPal's employees, whose word is "final". The term remains in their EULA despite the court decision that it would mislead customers into thinking they didn't have access to a real court anymore.
Google has major connections with In-Q-Tel, the CIA's corporate investment arm. When the CIA wants to market technologies it has developed with taxpayer money, it puts them on the private market through In-Q-Tel. The CIA's Keyhole technology became known to us as... Google Earth. Facebook also has serious In-Q-Tel connections. There appears to be a lot of these companies working with the Information Awareness Office, who openly states its efforts to compile online information online on citizens in a centralized government database. Note that Google has placed itself as the free information service leader. Put your contacts list, your spreadsheets, and anything else you've got on Google's various free services. How convenient.
Google's "Don't be evil." slogan hearkens back to the Bohemian Grove's ("Weaving spiders come not here") as well as a rich, ancient tradition of invoking evil and other dark, malevolent symbols by attaching the concept of "not" to them and calling it good. This has been done for centuries in magickal lore and storytelling, using charms against various nasty things as a means of invoking that specific thing in a socially-acceptable way. Magickally, you call upon something by invoking the concept - and specifying "not [this]" is as much an invocation as saying "[this]". Among those who use this convention, it becomes a subtle form of calling card and social identifier to one another. It's been used for centuries.
Re:Google Wallet vs PayPal (Score:5, Interesting)
That isn't' what the article is saying. According to the TFA, they are banning accounts which refuse to use wallet as it's billing option. They are not requiring you to list it as an option, but rather requiring you to use it as well or face suspension.
From TFA:
Re:Google Wallet vs PayPal (Score:2, Interesting)
This concept is also used in hypnosis. It's called embedded commands. For example:
When you are ready, you can relax fully now that you know it is time to go deeper inside.
Embedded commands in that statement:
you are ready, relax fully now, go deeper inside
It is based on the knowledge that there is a vast difference between how we interpret things consciously and unconsciously. Think about the difference between saying "Don't be evil (embedded command: be evil) and "Always be nice". The former focuses you on being evil (you must think of evil before you can even begin to decide to not do it) and the latter focuses you on the outcome of being nice. While the first statement appears to have the same intent as the second, they are processed completely different by the unconscious mind.
Example: If I say to you "don't think of a monkey"...what image just popped into your head?
And lastly, take a look at what some people have discovered about DARE (http://alcoholfacts.org/DARE.html)
What do you expect when you focus their minds on doing drugs/alcohol instead of focusing their minds on being healthy? Note that I am not saying that the people that developed DARE did this on purpose. Simply that we move towards what we think about. There is a vast difference between thinking about "Don't do drugs" and "live a healthy life"