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Comment by thomassmith65 | Hacker News Reader

25 years ago, 'customer focus' was the buzz word.

Gmail (and similar products) killed it.

The internet made it possible for a company to serve hundreds of millions of people without the overhead of listening to, or supporting, or giving much of a shit about them. "Why are you complaining? It's free!"

Gmail envy makes it seem like you're some underachieving sucker if you bend over backwards to deliver a great customer experience.

It probably would be possible to have a billion customers and make them happy, but the number of employees it would take would only make you rich, instead of unfathomably rich.

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I'm not sure Gmail is the right example here. When it came out, Gmail was way better than the other free email services (Hotmail, Yahoo, etc). It was the product that bent over backwards to deliver a great customer experience.

Gmail was a great product because they doled out a GB of storage for free. Agreed that they introduced other features people liked.

As a user, you were faceless. I have a vague memory from the early Gmail days. I'm pretty sure they charged me $5 to contact support.

Customer focus includes more than having a good product, though having a good product is a component. The business model Google chose (it was a choice) for Gmail wasn't compatible with focusing on Google's customers.

That said, there were other good examples. I chose Gmail because I believe it was one of the best known products of the era.

Too late to edit my comment.

I'm embarrassed to say, I just realized the big problem with my original comment, and it is hackneyed: the end-users probably weren't the customers.

I doubt Google was cavalier about its relationships with advertisers back then.

Customer focus means not just resolving issues or having a reachable customer service, it can also be pre-empting the need to reach out to customer service by making the product issue free as much as possible.

Gmail in its early stage had a simple surface area. These days a Google account could mean a gateway to entire digital life for some. It requires much more focus and responsibility to handle and Google never had plans to do any of that from the beginning.

You're close. It's not Gmail, the product that killed it. It's the business model of "free products." That's because Gmail is not the product - it's a delivery platform that's just useful enough to you to keep using it. The product is ads, and you are not the customer.

Gmail is a good example of being a Very Good Company, waiting a few years when everyone is hooked on the products the company made, and then turning in the one we know today where Do No Evil was long scrubbed as a motto.

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