Comment by danilocampos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danilocampos | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

B-b-but Google made this fancy video advertisement about how I can give my infant daughter a Gmail account and write to her as she grows up! Does it only work if she never uses it? You've gotta wait until you can hold a bat mitzvah to hand it off to her?

This kind of chicanery is why I can only chuckle when Google announces new initiatives that require significant customer service, like selling telephones or providing a fulfillment system to compete with Amazon Prime. They treat their users like ants. And given the way their business is structured, that scale is about correct.

Google doesn't need for any given user of their service to be pleased. They're a whale, straining krill from the ocean, playing a vast advertising numbers game on a scale individuals can barely grasp, and can barely factor into.

Which is not an illegitimate position. But it poses a problem for individuals who are swept into its gaping maw - there is zero incentive machinery to compel Google to ever get things corrected. Depending on where a product is on its growth curve, it might even cost Google more to fix the problem than to replace the users. Your only recourse is to hope for enough public embarrassment to short-circuit the system.

It also calls into question the viability of their entry into any business where service is a differentiating characteristic.

It may feel like the Googles and the Facebooks are self-sustaining juggernauts, but customer happiness and retention is exactly the incentive machinery you are missing.

Everyone plays the balance game. You can have the best customer service in the world, but my daughter is still going to cry if your moving company breaks her stuff, or your store sells us tainted dog food, or your family-run email service writes the wrong data to the backup tapes just before a failure. Amazon might be awesome in terms of rates of well handled customers, but Google is doing pretty well, maw metaphors notwithstanding.

edit: it's really the rates of bad experiences/customer I'm talking about. There's another side of things, that of, bad experiences/customer with a problem, which Amazon is better at (in a market that isn't really comparable to the one in which google's services primarily reside, of course). On the other hand, Bezos's often cited goal of every call that has to be made to customer service being a bug to be fixed is exactly google's goal, it just sounds a lot better when there's still a number you could call.

It may feel like the Googles and the Facebooks are self-sustaining juggernauts, but customer happiness and retention is exactly the incentive machinery you are missing.

Except we're not their customers.

You can substitute "user", but as william42 pointed out, the distinction means little. Feel free to bring up to anyone here relying on VC that their users aren't their customers, and be amazed once again at how little insight that provides.

If you want to contribute some signal instead of noise, you could say they have two sets of customers with sometimes opposed motivations. But that isn't uncommon (and if it isn't another set of customers, it's your suppliers or the hours in the day or something else). As I said, everyone plays the balance game.

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 card companies certainly regard them as a customer...

Multi-sided markets[1] are much more common in real life than you'd think, and the subject of significant study[2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-sided_market

[2] http://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?q=multi+sided+market...

>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.

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!").

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.

"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...

is the correct sentence

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...

Concur: To lose a customer is to lose some chunk of revenue. To lose a user is to lose some chunk of page views to be sold. A very important distinction. You can offset shed users by adjusting the product to generate more page views, as publishers well know. Lose too many customers, though, and that's a lot of money that's simply not hitting your pocket anymore.

With that in mind, I'm pretty sure Netflix would not email me asking to know about the quality of a given streamed movie if I were merely a user.

And the way I know that is that YouTube has never once checked in on me to see how my streaming experience went.

I disagree with it. If I am conducting a free for all art exhibition (no selling of arts, just for people to see), then the visitors are not my customers. They are just viewers. I could have advertisers or sponsors for that program and someone could even be paying me based on the number of visitors. That does not make the visitors my customers.

On a side note- even if I lose my staff, I lose some chunk or revenue, that does not make my staff my customer.

if you wrote out your first paragraph in an actual formula, you would realize what you're missing here. You can't always generate more page views, so gaining or retaining users would then become what you want to maximize (as publishers wish they could). Lose advertisers, get more users or make the ads more effective and earn more. Make a product that users and advertisers like, and you maybe get more of both. Finding the sweet spot remains hard. Ignoring these dynamics is not helpful.

Your point about adwords customers getting someone on the phone is important, because not all adwords customers can. Preferential treatment for large customers is not at all unusual, and I don't think anyone would argue that it is bad. They just want a phone number they can call too.

Netflix and Youtube have completely different streaming models (namely youtube's is not adaptive), but I do see a "report a bug" link on there. But this ignores my point, which was not that google customer service is awesome, just that there definitely is a feedback loop ("there is zero incentive machinery"), and that "product not a customer" still misses the point as much as it ever has.

only at a completely shortsighted first approximation. Any policy they have regarding advertisers are parameters to optimize revenue as well.

However, you write "to be optimized", so clearly you agree with my original comment. Catchphrase away, then.

Yeah, but if we leave, then the advertisers(their "real customers") will too, so it works out the same.

It really doesn't. Advertisers have committed budgets and have switching costs that are often much, much higher than those of end users. It would take a sustained, double-digit-percentage loss of users to impact Google's bottom line.

One user fucked over out of 1,000, even if they never return, is pretty easy to paper over. Which is why there's no phone number a user can call if they're in trouble. They don't really matter, so it's not worth the cost to address their issue.

AdWords advertisers, on the other hand, they can get a human on the phone whenever they want. Because if they have an issue, it's honest-to-god cash money that stops flowing into Google's coffers.

They're the real customers.

We are customers, but the currency is attention, not money.

This is absurd. Instead of not collecting data for children Google is blocking access to children. I am seriously looking for alternatives to Gmail. Any suggestions? I don't want my email account hooked up to a social network and advertising machinery.

This has been covered on HN before, the solution is pretty simple: just use a (free) Google Apps account instead and create accounts for your children. You will be responsible for complying with COPPA yourself instead of Google.

All you need is a domain name, but it's a good idea to have that anyways in case you ever want to leave. I use this solution with my kids and it works great because it also allows me to control access to certain services and reset passwords for them, etc.

It's a bit more complex than that. In order to comply, Google would need to verify that you are a parent/guardian and that you are giving permission for your child to join. Faxing of identity documents would likely be involved.

Google's approach is heavy handed, but it's a really bad law.

What we need is for big, well funded companies to somehow use their influence to get bad laws changed...

But the only thing in politics more powerful than corporate money is "For the children!!!"...

That, and "or the terrorists win!"

This may be a bit out there, but how about paying for email services?

It seems like a very straightforward solution to me.

If an account is created for a person under-age, suspend ad service to that account (end data collection) and require a nominal fee to activate it (which provides abundant evidence of parental consent). Cutting off the next generation from email does not seem like the answer. Would a Montessori-educated, eight-year-old Sergey Brin have appreciated such treatment?

Since that won't happen, I mean, when we have kids I guess we just have to pay for hosting and administer their email ourselves?

knowing the childs email address in and of itself appears to be data collection in regards to COPPA.

http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus45-how-comply-childrens...

Which means it would be impossible to provide an email service to a child, right, short of self-hosting?

I don't think so, its just that you'd have to obtain parental consent 100% of the time. Data gathering is baked into providing an email service, that part of COPPA seems logical enough to me. The issue of targeted ads vs untargeted ads vs no ads doesn't appear to have anything to do with anything, other than what you'd notify the parents you are doing, and what you are asking their consent of.

So then everyone who doesn't want data collection or ads, but wants to use google just applies for an under 13 account.

Google products are free, they make money on data collection/advertisements. People who they can't advertise to aren't profitable, and it's unlikely a nominal fee would make up for all the overhead. The user is their product not their customer.

So you limit it to 500 MB of storage and show blanket Club Penguin ads instead of targeted ones. Whatever. It's a completely solvable problem. And it's fine if Google doesn't want to solve it. They should just let their ad agency know.

>show blanket Club Penguin ads

OK I concede that one, and it made me laugh.

Get your own domain and point your email at fastmail.fm.

It's not absurd when you know that collecting data and google are two sides of the same coin.

Want your email free, just do it the internet way: host your own.

Its very easy, simply jump onto Amazon's ec2 free instance and setup a webserver/webmail vm

it will cost you very little and you will not have to deal with crap like that, alternatively you can have a chat to your friendly domain hosting company, I am sure they will have something that will fit your needs.

But since Google can't collect data to target ad to the children, Google doesn't make any money from them. Google don't need children that can't pay money. Case closed.

This would seem to have more to do with the 535 dumbest people on the planet than with Google.

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.

The fact that it makes Google look bad doesn't impact its fairness. I acknowledged that that's not an illegitimate way to run the business.

But that doesn't really matter to a little girl whose correspondence with loved ones has disappeared down a black hole. That despair is as reasonable as Google's indifference. And, it points to a great opportunity to make a reliable mail service that addresses the needs of the ever-growing population of young people who will need email long before it is regulatorily convenient to Google.

Disney manages to provide good customer service for the millions of real-life humans that walk its theme parks annually. Google's problem is not that it can't be done, but that it's unprofitable to provide customer service when your business model consists of making a few pennies here and there.

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.

If Google charged hundreds of dollars for each user they could surely afford a bubbly teenager to provide personalized service too. They're completely separate businesses and models, there is no comparing the two.

Disney also does the same with tens of millions of online kids with Club Penguin

From the post:

> They provide COPPA compliant email accounts for children under 13 from their Apps for Education domains.

The capability is obviously there, and apparently COPPA has a way for parents to provide consent.

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.

In many ways, we are paying customers of Google as well. We are exchanging very valuable data for Google's services.

So here's where the problem occurs with the law and Google's business model.

Android...... Where does it say anywhere that Android devices can only be sold to those old enough not to be covered by COPPA?

their time as innovative and useful is coming to a halt. they have nearly zero incentive any more to improve, even in their core products. search results everyday become more and more polluted with seo spam. google maps hasn't changed in years, still the same blocky loading and no useful overlays like demographic data built right in.

>google maps hasn't changed in years, still the same blocky loading

MapsGL. http://support.google.com/maps/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

Indoor maps? Not to mention this whole Google Maps on your phone thing (and navigation on your Android phone)...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com