Customers, Users and Losers

or...Who is the Product?

It is a common beginner mistake to consider customers and users to be the same. A little reflection soon reveals that not only are they different, their interests may not even be aligned! Let's see some examples.

Example	Vendor	Product	Customer	User	Customer-User Interest Alignment
Dining at a restaurant	Restaurant	Dining experience	The host	All diners	Good
Drawing class	Independent art teacher	Drawing lessons	Parent	Child	Good
Commercial Software License	ISV	Some software	Evaluator, Decision Maker, Procurement Person	Actual users	Fair
AWS	Amazon	IaaS	Cloud buyer	Developers	Good
Gmail	Google	Email	Advertiser	We	Poor
Facebook	Facebook	Social network	Advertiser	We	Poor
Twitter	Twitter	Microblogging network	Advertiser	We	Poor

But that doesn’t make sense. Why would Google, Facebook and Twitter create products that generate a conflict of interest between customer and user? They don’t. We’ve got the wrong picture. The product isn’t what we think it is. Here is the real deal: 
 

Example		Vendor		Product		Customer	User			Customer-User Interest Alignment
Gmail	Google		We		Advertiser			Ad platform users	Good
Facebook	Facebook		We		Advertiser			Ad platform users	Good
Twitter	Twitter		We		Advertiser			Ad platform users	Good

We are the product that is probed, segmented, analyzed and sold to the highest bidder. What we experience as the product (email, social network etc) is merely the farm meant to rear the real product – us. This is the sad inescapable reality of any business that chooses advertising instead of subscriptions as its revenue model.