Google math

I was checking into using Google for Business to handle our ranch’s email. We already use their Gmail, but the Business mail offers more and only costs $50 per year.

I was checking out the features and had to view their introductory video twice because I thought something didn’t quite add up. As background, do any of you remember Google’s billboards recruiting people to work for them? The boards showed arcane symbolism that only a geek could appreciate. Like the sum of primes of factors of mathematical constants, or zeroes and ones that spell out something that no normal human ever heard of. The billboards were very successful in recruiting some very smart people to do Google’s magic. The problem was (and still is), very few normal people work at Google, the kind of people who can communicate effectively with the unwashed masses that make up Google’s audience. And some of their communicators don’t speak very clearly nor can they do simple math.

To illustrate my point, click on the link and view the short video titled Gmail Overview. The “announcer” mumbles his way through the script. At about the 1:10 mark listen to him say “that’s more than fifty times the industry average.” Google gives you 25 gigs of storage while others give you only one gig. Twenty-five times one equals fifty?

Google, you make me giggle.