TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Matt Alexander:

The reason advertising is the predominant means for Google’s revenue is because it is business model agnostic. Knowing it can advertise products to people atop its various platforms, Google can sustain and build virtually anything it wants for the maximum number of users. The cost of entry for a user into the Google ecosystem is a minuscule processing cycle occurring somewhere deep within an anonymous server farm to push a targeted ad towards you.

Perhaps you, as a technologist, balk at such an intrusion. Most, however, focus only upon the end-result.

For mobile, it isn’t the case that mobile advertising allows Google to “sustain” anything they would like to build. Estimates place mobile’s contribution to Google’s total revenue at 13 percent for 2013, despite all of the Android and iOS devices in use. What’s allowed them to experiment so much on the “desktop” web and on mobile is revenue generated from Google search advertisements, which have been strong for years.

That success allowed the experimentation to happen. As search increasingly shifts to mobile devices, however, revenue generated from mobile will have to grow substantially to replace desktop-based search, and grow dramatically to offset mobile’s lower advertising margin. Which means that advertising probably is not and will not be something that’s built atop its new mobile products and services, but will instead be built into the products and services themselves to maximize effectiveness. You won’t see ads in a yellow box besides search results on Google Glass. The pizza restaurant it suggests when you ask for a dinner recommendation might be the ad, or the nice Thai place a couple blocks away that Google Now recommends because it knows it’s almost dinner time and, from your search results and emails, it knows you like Thai food, might be as well.

Which is fine, in and of itself. But things can get into the gray spectrum really quick when a company is monitoring your location, search queries, emails, calendar, social network activity (if you use Google+), et al., in order to not only provide you with specific recommendations and timely information (“you need to leave in ten minutes for your 2pm meeting”), but also to better serve you targeted and timely adverts. Many people are fine with it, of course (I have my misgivings, but don’t find it morally wrong), but many people might not feel so good about their activity being logged so they can be sold to more effectively. And it’s certainly a lot easier to cross the line into abusing that power in order to maximize revenue rather than to maximize utility for the user when your primary source of revenue are the advertisements themselves.

That says nothing, either, about whether the world Google is creating with Glass and Google Now is a desirable one. But, nonetheless, Google is not a villain, nor is Apple a savior. As Matt notes, Google is filled with incredibly bright people working feverishly to create things they think will make people’s lives a little better. That’s absolutely true, and I’ve no doubt that Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s motivations are the same. That does not mean, however, that the business model they choose is divisible from the form their product and services take, nor that the products and services they create are necessarily beneficial. I don’t think it’s Google’s goal to push as many advertisements as possible through everyone’s eyeballs, but I’m also concerned about the philosophical motivation underlying Google’s path (and, for that matter, Facebook’s).