Or maybe just incompetence…
This morning I popped up my Google Calendar to be presented with a dialogue box about Google’s latest wonderful addition to my browsing pleasure: the Notification calendar “Never forget anything again…” or something along those lines. The options were, effectively ‘Yes please’ or ‘No thanks’. I of course, clicked ‘No thanks’: I’ve other perfectly adequate ways of giving myself reminders, the existing Calendar notification mechanism being just one. “Right. That’s got rid of that” I thought. Wrong!
Then I noticed that, on my calendar list, a new entry had appeared: ‘Reminders’. “Great” I thought “How do I get rid of this?”
Clicking on it does un-colour it, but it’s still there, cluttering up my list (which is, if truth be told, already pretty cluttered). Remembering the Birthdays fiasco, I thought “I’ll go to settings… I must be able to get rid of it there…” Wrong!
It is listed there, under ‘Settings’, ‘Calendars’, with an entry in the ‘show in list’ column: A fixed, selected, greyed-out entry. No options to edit notifications, settings or, of course, unsubscribe. Once again Corporate Arrogance (as mentioned in the title) has struck again. Google want you to have their new offering and are going to make bloody sure that you have their latest offering whether you want it or not. You want Google Calendar, then they’ll decide what functionality you have to have.
Even in Google’s own expressed opinion, Notifications isn’t ‘interesting’: it’s not even in the ‘Browse interesting calendars’ list… But then again, ‘Birthdays’ wasn’t in there for long, either…
Typically, they give lip-service to democracy and customer service by actually asking up-front if you want their new whizzy wonder. Shame they ignore your answer!
I can only imagine that this new ‘must-have’ facility is Google’s latest attempt to push their sales agenda onto an unsuspecting public. How long before corporate-sponsered ‘reminders’ start popping up all over your calendar?