Good morning, lovely!
For the last number of years - gosh, I can’t even begin to tell you how many years - I’ve been thinking about what it would mean to unwind Brutal Pixie from Google.
Like many people around the world, I bought into the Google promise early.
The idea that I could have cloud-based everything tickled me pink.
No more hard drives, I thought. No more forgetting my backups, I thought. Everything exactly where I want it, whenever I want it, without the headaches of setting up email clients, file sharing, and so on and so forth.
So, way back in 2010 I think it was, before Brutal Pixie was a formal entity, I dived into the pool.
It was great. For a while.
I managed to deal with things even with internet outages, moving houses (and subsequent internet outages).
When smartphones became a cost-effective tool, I could run my business from my phone. In fact, and this is shameful to admit, I thought that running on a Google platform was the only way I could do this.
I was wrong.
And over time, I became less and less enamoured of the tech giant.
Google dropped its Do no evil statement in 2015. In the same year, the business became part of a new holding company, Alphabet.
That company owns a staggering number of other companies. According to Wikipedia, about 200. Many of them are what you’d expect: Search engines, blogging platforms, operating systems, 3D modelling software, etc.
They also own robotics, artificial intelligence companies, aerospace companies, eye-tracking, facial recognition, and pharmaceutical companies - including vaccine companies.
So, right off the bat you have wonder whether Google’s ad-serving and search engine tools can be fair. If they own other companies, surely they want to benefit their own companies? And if there is material online that might dissuade people from using their products (ahem, vaccines), then perhaps Google could filter it out or make it more difficult to view. Right? It might be a philosophical question, but it is one with massive impact.
Just like the question that was in the landmark Australian case Duffy vs Google.
Besides this, there are a staggering number of questionable behaviours exhibited by Google and its related companies.
For example, some people experience Google’s platforms’ search results in different colours, according to Google’s assessment of what is good or bad. You’ll notice that some content has a red background, others are grey, others are blue. The ones that are red are those that do not align with Google’s political perspective. Wikipedia does this, too, you know.
Another example is the Search Engine Manipulation Effect. This applies to the ‘auto-suggestions’ offered by Google. Researcher Robert Epstein has proved over and over again that this apparently innocuous tool creates massive psychological shifts, even in political alignment, and that it has potential impact on election outcomes.
That’s not scary at all, is it?
Another example is the absolute misalignment of YouTube’s stated perspectives and YouTube’s actual behaviours. You might not know that street violence is verboten on the YouTube platform. Well, I should correct myself. You might know this if you are a libertarian or slightly right of centre, because of video removals; but if you’re left of centre? No problem, mate.
Then I learned that Google scans every email that it hosts.
And every document.
Apparently, this is so that it can ‘show you appropriate ads’. Sure, it is.
Way back in 2017, maybe because of testing?, those people with documents in Drive that Google decided were inappropriate, found that they started disappearing. I’ve heard on the wire that this is now not accidental, but happens to those whose Drives host videos and documents that Google decides is inappropriate, such as Brian Rose, David Icke, Alex Jones, and others.
I could go on. And on. And on.
Unlike many out there who are happy to live in a world of cognitive dissonance, I take a perspective that is as follows:
The only things I can control are in my world. That means, I can control my own behaviours. As a result, my behaviours impact others in the world. Therefore, if I have a problem with something, I can choose to take an action.
So I decided to take action and leave the Googlesphere.
Just as I bailed out of Facebook many years ago after its emotional contagion experiments, I made a firm decision that enough was enough. If you didn’t hear about that, here’s an article from 2014 about Facebook’s lack of ethics. And you thought that their privacy leaks were the first problem. Nope.
Ok, I made the decision.
Actually actioning this thing was harder than you’d imagine.
First, I had to fix the file management system so that I wouldn’t lose my beloved cloud functionality.
Then, I had to work out how to get all of my data.
Then, I had to switch over without losing anything I rely on. Unfortunately this meant that I had to establish a free gmail account so that I still had calendar sync with my appointments system. I figure that this is allowable while in Stage One of the Great Google Removal.
Changing to git-based file repositories solved the cloud functionality. And it also gave me surprising benefits:
I didn’t need to access the cloud to review the latest docs with clients, because I already had them!
No more insecure wifi in public places
Much, much lower storage requirements (because Markdown files are in tens of kilobytes and not tens of megabytes).
Happily, Google Takeout gives you all of your data as a download. It takes a while to get it all. Then you have to check it. But once you’ve got it, there’s really nothing left to do but to cancel your subscriptions and keep rolling.
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to completely unwind the business from Google.
My accountant, for example, uses Google Drive, which is something I really wish she wouldn’t do. So all of my critical documentation is saved in a free Google account established for the purpose.
But even so, moving out of Google only took me 48 hours.
Setting up email across devices was a breeze.
Accessing necessary docs is a no-brainer.
Using my phone for comms and email is not a problem (I found a fabulous, privacy-first email client that uses IMAP).
The only thing I’ve got left to navigate are all of those sites for which I’d (foolishly) opted for Open Authentication using Google logins. However, I’m seeing it as an opportunity to rebuild all of my logins elsewhere on the web, and to do so much more securely.
So far, it feels good.
One of the other major benefits is the money I’ll save. While it might only be $180 per year, it’s still $180 per year. And with this almost-mama potentially stepping out of selling anything for the six months of October to March, every dollar counts.
You might be wondering what was the instigating force that made me take action?
Well, I’ll tell you:
It paid an analyst about a grand to assess my SaaS stack.
As a result of that one decision, I am getting out of a vast number of software platforms, knowing now that I’m not going to lose any functionality.
And in the process, I’m saving approximately $2500 per year. In the first twelve months, the return on that analyst investment is 150%. You can’t argue with that!
Finally, darling reader, there’s something I’d like to suggest.
That is, that the golden era of SaaS is coming to an end.
Software-as-a-service is a great model when times are good. But when times are bad, it’s foolish. I say that knowing that one platform I was using (for proposals and payments) took up 34% of my spend. When I advised clients past and present that I was removing it, I discovered a handful of others bailing out at exactly the same time.
The great scam of it all is that a vast number of businesses have been established so that they require SaaS products.
As for me?
With email, open source office clients, a git repository, and some cloud-based accounting software, I’ve got everything I need.
Have pen, will travel, as it were.
Food for thought, eh?
‘til next time!
Leticia