Advertising is taking over Google, and it ain't a good thing!
I was trying to balance Mr. See's credit card account for him and I searched on the Google Play site for the Capital One "app." Weirdly, it recommended the "Credit One" app which had a similar swoop logo as Capital One and I mistakenly clicked on it to install before I realized my error. "Credit One" is one of those prepaid credit card deals (apparently) with high user fees - a raw deal for consumers. How badly do you have to suck before even Motley Fool says you are a bad bargain? (Hint: Offer a branded "Motley Fool" prepaid credit card and watch how quickly the "fools" change their tune!).
By the way, Capital One, feel free to us this experience of mine as evidence of a "likelihood of confusion" by an ordinary consumer. Because if this could confuse a (former) trademark attorney, it certainly would confuse an ordinary consumer. On the other hand, the fact that CreditOne intentionally copied CapitalOne's logo is all you need to know about the business ethics of CreditOne!
UPDATE: It seems that "Credit One" changed to their new logo in 2006 and Capital One adopted theirs in 2008. If so, then Credit One can claim "Prior use" of the mark and Capital One should fire its logo designer for not catching this back in 2008. For some reason, Capital One seems content to use a logo distressingly similar to that of a prepaid credit card company. Maybe they are related somehow?
What was interesting to me, though, was that the Capital One app was nowhere listed when I searched for it on the Google Play site. They had an app for "creditwise" by Capital One and another Capital One app for apparently trading treasuries. But no Capital One app!
I went to the Capital One site and they had a link to download the app. I clicked on it and it claimed I already had the app on my phone. So I opened that and.... Capital One is claiming that my version of Android is not sufficient to run the app. It is a slow app, which is mystifying as how many bytes of data do you need to tell me my credit card balance and pay my bill? Gigabytes apparently, as they have to load all this silly pointless animation. IT professionals are dogs. Ugly dogs.
When you are in rural America with one bar of service, you don't really care about spinning animated logos or videos of happy smiling people who just got a HELOC. You want the basics, period. For some reason, Bank of America has a far, far more complicated site that can do far more - but for some reason, both the app and the site load more quickly than Capital One.
I declined Capital One's generous offer to upgrade my version of Android. Why? Two big reasons. First, bitter hard-fought and hard-won experience has told me that "upgrading" your operating system can brick your device, either literally or virtually. I had an old laptop that was running Windows 98 just fine (!!) and I decided to "upgrade" it to Windows whatever and it slowed the machine down to a crawl. It was fortunate I was getting rid of it anyway. So I am hesitant to "upgrade" my O/S either on a phone or a laptop, as it will make the devices useless.
For example, how well do you think my old Toshiba C655 will run on Windows 11? Probably not at all and I can do without ads in my O/S thank you.
Which neatly brings me to the second point. We've been watching YouTube movies, "Free with Ads!" for a while now, but since I had adblocker installed, well,, no ads. I have disabled auto-updates for Android on all our Android devices and Windows doesn't offer auto-updates for Windows 7 Ultimate anyway (they did try to force-feed me Windows 10 years ago, but I caught on to the scam and disabled that feature).
Updates are not always in your favor. In fact, I suspect that the "patches" and updates offered these days are mostly so the provider can make more money from you - and not to screen against viruses or whatever. They use that fear to sell you on the update, though!
But you know what? Fuck Google. Fuck 'em all! People are claiming Zuckerman is a hero for introducing a Twitter alternative - like the guy who lets anti-vaxxer memes fester on Facebook is going to be the new Sheriff of the Internet and finally clean up this town!
Google in particularly has jumped the shark, burying its "don' be evil" mandate and selling out to the highest bidder. Google searches are less and less useful, as they are full of "promoted content" that is trying to sell you something. Image searches on Google are the worst - just photos you can buy or license, or pictures of products for you to buy. Actual data is hard to find or non-existant.
Hey, there's no profit in helping people find useful links, right? But plenty of money to be made selling people crap online.
But therein lies the problem. We can't expect Google to run a charity - or any other company, for that matter. They have to sell us to make money, or we have to pay a subscription fee for real services. And no one wants to pay a subscription fee unless it was for work or something.
