I’ve written several times before—the latest time here— about the pernicious effect that advertising can have on a company. I’m not talking about a company advertising itself and its products. Rather, I’m referring to the increasingly common practice of allowing third parties to use their products or services to push advertisements at their hapless customers or—worse yet—the harvesting of information about those customers to sell to advertisers.
The inevitable the end of this disgusting process is that the company’s customers are replaced by the advertisers as the actual customers. Those buying their products and services become simply a product that they can sell to the advertisers.
A poster boy for this process is General Motors, which, even when faced with fierce opposition from the buyers of their vehicles, has decided to stop offering Car Play and Android Auto in their new electric vehicles. This despite compelling data suggesting that all things being equal people will chose the option with car play.
For a while it looked as if GM was backing off from those plans but now according to John Gruber reporting on a tweet from Joanna Stern on X, that is not the case. As Gruber puts it, GM CONFIRMS THEY’RE STILL SMOKING CRACK. They are doing this, of course, because they believe that they can use their proprietary multimedia system to spy on users and sell the data to advertisers.
We can only hope that GM stockholders will demand the wholesale replacement of their C-suite pour encourager les autres or that car buyers will make the decision moot by driving GM out of business.