191–199 of 199 posts
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The distinction is very important: a customer is someone who pays you money. To Google and Facebook, users are just parameters to be optimized.
"you're not the customer you're the product" It's such an attractive meme, isn't it? Short, straight to the point, and it seems to make sense. What could possibly be wrong? Like most things, the explanation why it is wrong is subtle, and much longer than the seven words it takes to express. But think about this: credit card machines are usually provided free to merchants. Merchants aren't the product, and the credit…
Of course they are! Have you ever actually seen a credit card commercial? What do they talk about? The color of their cards? How people feel when using them? No, the focus on what companies will accept them (e.g. "it's everywhere you want to be!").
This little rant you bring up every time someone points out the nature of for-free services is as off base as ever.
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That's a terrible analogy and if you want to go there, Disney has made plenty of little girls cry every day.
I'm addressing the claim that automation is the only way to service millions of users. Whether people cry despite having the ability to receive personalized service is orthogonal to the point.
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"you're not the customer you're the product" It's such an attractive meme, isn't it? Short, straight to the point, and it seems to make sense. What could possibly be wrong? Like most things, the explanation why it is wrong is subtle, and much longer than the seven words it takes to express. But think about this: credit card machines are usually provided free to merchants. Merchants aren't the product, and the credit…
>Merchants aren't the product Of course they are! Have you ever actually seen a credit card commercial? What do they talk about? The color of their cards? How people feel when using them? No, the focus on what companies will accept them (e.g. "it's everywhere you want to be!"). This little rant you bring up every time someone points out the nature of for-free services is as off base as ever.
Look again: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OolP9gNLP6c
Look how much business they are doing! How much quick to process it is compared to cash!
You are right of course - most mass market ads focus on the consumers, not the merchants. BUT the merchants are customers too, and it is the consumers that credit cards attractive to merchants. Classic multi-sided market.
This little rant you bring up every time someone points out the nature of for-free services is as off base as ever.
I'm glad it is being noticed.
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"you're not the customer you're the product" It's such an attractive meme, isn't it? Short, straight to the point, and it seems to make sense. What could possibly be wrong? Like most things, the explanation why it is wrong is subtle, and much longer than the seven words it takes to express. But think about this: credit card machines are usually provided free to merchants. Merchants aren't the product, and the credit…
"If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold." is the correct sentence [1], also you are welcome to explain why it's wrong according to you, but imho you are mistaken. [1] http://www.metafilter.com/95152/Userdriven-discontent#325604...
I got the quote from [1]. You may well be correct about the original version - I was trying to make it as short and clear as possible. I'm not sure it matters too much, though.
[1] http://techland.time.com/2010/10/15/facebook-youre-not-the-c...
This post hit me with a serious case of deja vu. And then I dug this up: http://sunpig.com/martin/archives/2011/07/03/google-made-my-...
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For the record Thunderbird's IMAP sync is not a reliable backup mechanism by itself. If many emails are deleted from your account, Thunderbird will sync (and delete your files locally) before you have the opportunity to copy them off somewhere safe. I know this from deleting all my mails off my gmail account (to make an encrypted archive) and trying to use TB as a reliable storage method -- since I had just taken a b…
I believe you can configure TB to handle this situation differently. That is, if a mail is deleted from the web mailbox, retain the copy on disk.
Of course, this was in Feb 2011. Maybe things have changed now.
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That is not entirely fair, automation is the only way to admin millions of users and when nonsensical factors like COPPA get introduced to the system this happens. And I don't think that they did anything wrong here considering the consequences of not complying with the law.
Amazon has quite an awesome service actually for the few times I had to deal with them. They also have quite a few users. Oh, but right, those are actually customers paying for what they get. I guess Google support is what you get for using a free service after all.