Cote’: “If only Google would charge for GMail and GCal, and thus be accountable when things go wrong, they’d be a viable option for enterprise messaging.”
Why oh why does Google need to charge for GMail and GCal to be accountable when things go wrong?? I just don’t understand that. Am I not already a customer? There’s a new business model in town..
Indeed. I am guilty of being a conduit in that instance for other people’s thinking other than my own. Personally, I’m “OK” with the SLAs (so to speak) that GMail has.
That said, I’d feel much better if they stated something like, “We are commited to keeping GMail up even though it’s a free service. To that end, here is a page/blog/etc. that tells you our uptime and details any outages we have.”
Having a “trust” or “.info” page, along with a track record of quickly bringing back up systems, is a good enough substitute for paying for me. Having done enterprise software support, I know that paying isn’t always a panacea of getting things quickly fixed.
I’m actually not OK with Gmail’s terms of use. Personally, I think it’s a cop-out. So what if it’s a free service? Subscriptions are not how Google makes its money. You’d think they’d want to instill some confidence in their users, to motivate those users to keep coming back, which *is* how Google makes its money. The only reason Google (and the others too—Google is not alone) get away with it is because the general population equates “free service” with “not a customer”. That’s OK though. If this becomes a large enough issue to a large enough group of people, that just means there’s an opening for the next innovation. Unless, of course, the data we’ve all dutifully migrated into the current generation of systems is stuck there..
Customer: “one that purchases a commodity or service.” From http://webster.com/dictionary/customer
You keep saying it’s something different from that, but saying it doesn’t make it so. Google’s customers are their advertisers. You are an eyeball. And just like TV, they *WANT* to make you happy, to keep you coming back — but that is NOT the same as a vendor-customer relationship.
I enjoy your blog. I read it regularly. It adds value to my life. What commitments are you willing to make to me about the frequency and quality of your posts and availability of your website? None? I thought not. Perhaps because I’m not a customer of yours.
John,
You make very good points. I’m still not convinced though. There’s a very fuzzy line here, and I’m not sure you can apply old definitions without rethinking them at least somewhat. Imagine there’s a web site that charges me $1 but makes an additional $100 by advertising on its pages. I’m clearly a customer here, because I’m paying. Right? Say the company realizes it could make an additional $50 if they stop charging me the $1 (because there are far more people interested in using a “free” service). I’m no longer a customer? Seems like an arbitrary distinction to me.
By the way, if my livelihood came from selling advertising on this site, you’d better believe I’d consider you a customer!
-ian