The AI Bubble Is Bursting
Last week I awoke to Google deciding I hadn't had enough AI shoved down my throat. With no warning they decided to take the previously $20/user/month Gemini add-on and make it "free" and on by default. If that wasn't bad enough, they also decided to remove my ability as an admin to turn it off. Despite me hitting all the Off buttons I could find:
This situation is especially frustrating because we had already evaluated Gemini. I sat through sales calls, read the documentation, and tested it extensively. Our conclusion? It’s a bad service, inferior to everything on the market including free LLMs. Yet, now, to disable Gemini, I’m left with two unappealing options:
Taking how I feel about AI out of the equation, this is one of the most desperate and pathetic things I've ever seen a company do. Nobody was willing to pay you for your AI so, after wasting billions making it, you decide to force enable it and raise the overall price of Google Workspaces, a platform companies cannot easily migrate off of. Suddenly we've repriced AI from $20/user/month to "we hope this will help smooth over us raising the price by $2/user/month".
Plus, we know that Google knew I wouldn't like this because they didn't tell me they were going to do it. They didn't update their docs when they did it, meaning all my help documentation searching was pointless because they kept pointing me to when Gemini was a per-user subscription, not a UI nightmare that they decided to force everyone to use. Like a bad cook at a dinner party trying to sneak their burned appetizers onto my place, Google clearly understood I didn't want their garbage and decided what I wanted didn't matter.
