I'm Not Scum

So Google bought Picasa, which is interesting. And smart. Picassa is the best photo organizing tool, and Hello is the best photo sharing tool. Now both of them are free.

Photos and Google? Not really. People and Google. The one thing the Goo-Folks screwed up on their ascent was failing to build any relationship with their customers. Anyone could have switched from Google to NewSearch.com in a second. But the toolbar, deskbar, Gmail account, RSS feeds from GoogleGroups2, and now software you use to organize and share your photos are all a lot more inconvenient to shake. So Google put a few million of their current and future billions over to Bill Gross and his Idealab, and gave the world (or at least everybody who didn't already fork over the $29.95) a gift. But it wasn't an altruistic gesture. They're buying friends and loyalty.

But all that was obvious. What's really interesting, is that on the Picasa home page, when they encourage you to get this great free software, they make the following statement:

The download itself contains only the Picasa software. Picasa will not uninstall other programs or add any non-Picasa programs or files to your computer.

So this is what it has come to. A piece of software has to EXPLICITLY STATE that it isn't going to pollute your computer with spyware, scumware, adware, or where-the-hell-did-this-come-from-ware. You can't assume that anymore. Just like every email sign up now has the obligatory 'No really, we won't sell you out' disclaimer. Now all software downloads needs that too.

I generally dislike regulation, and think the government should be the course of absolutely last resort. But we're there on scumware/adware. Thanks alot to Claria, Kazza, and everybody else that made this sad day a reality.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at July 18, 2004 11:42 PM