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.
Except we're not their customers.
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.
To Google and Facebook, users are just parameters to be optimized.
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...
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.
[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...
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.
On a side note- even if I lose my staff, I lose some chunk or revenue, that does not make my staff my customer.
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.
However, you write "to be optimized", so clearly you agree with my original comment. Catchphrase away, then.
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.