The last few years, I have been reading I, Cringely for opinions on tech issues. I had thought that his rants made pretty good sense and he had some neat ideas, but now i have come to realize that he talks out of his ass a lot (at least for the former).

I have had experience with some of his recent topics, and while he is not entirely off base, he spins it very far to his advantage; spreading FUD. His latest post is also fundamentally wrong.

Cringely’s contention is that Google is wrong in charging more for Ad Words that have low “Quality Scores”; that is words that people won’t click on as often. He says that Ad Words are targeted towards “people selling goods of interest to millions of people“. Well he is missing the fundamental issue of inventory. Google and any other Ad displaying company has a limited “inventory” of users they can show ads too. If they sell Ad Words the people aren’t going to click on for cheap, and use up their inventory that way; then they will not make as money as if they kept that inventory for Ad Words with high “Quality Scores”.

This is just one example of where Cringely hears a lot of opinions from people and warps it into a sensational story. He does not do enough research to learn the entire story, or he chooses to ignore it.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: google, rant, webgeek