Commercials

BH divides her custom between the three majors, Sainsbury's, Tesco and Waitrose. The general pattern seems to be a couple of weeks here, then a couple of weeks there. Her activity is mirrored by that of the sales computers of said majors, punting out flurries of bogoff coupons to try and steer her back in their direction.

While I am now dividing my custom between bing and google. That is to say between the browser, search engine and maps provided by Microsoft and the same services by Google. With a similar result, that is to say, if I am using the gear from one, I get irritating pop-ups from the other, reminding me how much better their offering is.

While I am not sure that there is much to choose between them at all. I just hope that all the huge amount of effect involved in all this duplication is worth it. That the spur of competition does what the far right would claim for it.

But then again, maybe there is not as much duplication as at first appears, with the core of all the services being provided indifferently to both Microsoft and Google by some shadowy infrastructure outfit from China that one does not yet know about.

PS: I remain loyal to gmail, having been with them since not long after the beginning. Anyway, it would be a bit tricky for me to mix and match on that front, with one's email address being an important form of personal identifier these days. Ironic, given all the fuss we made in this country about the idea that there should be a national register of all the people living here - or otherwise claiming allegiance. Fuss at a time when the power of computers was not what it is now. Don't want the government, whom one might suppose to be acting in our interests, to do that sort of thing, but we are happy to let in the big technology companies. Which brings me back to the lecture, read to me some years ago now, by a young Irish barman in a small bar in Reading, about how core computer services ought to be provided by governments, neutrals (like Ireland) or perhaps the United Nations.