[cromwellian]

Google does not sell "users", that's why it is inaccurate and misleading.

What would you say of a private highway that sells billboards? If the business model of a private highway is not tolls, but instead selling ads along the road. "You're not the user, you're the product?" Would you say the highway owner is selling the personal information of the drivers?

The people buying billboards do not receive any personal identifying information about the drivers, they are instead buying access through an auction, like if this particular highway feeds into a sporting arena, then it is likely a good place to put ads for football fashion.

Within Google, Gmail/Inbox are Products. Their success metrics are user happiness and usage statistics. Like many startups, Google produces products which get marketshare and please users first, and then figure out the business model later. Google itself was launched with no real business model. And when Gmail was created, there was probably no plan on how to make money on it. They just wanted to do something awesome, and Gmail was born.

[JoshTriplett]

> What would you say of a private highway that sells billboards? If the business model of a private highway is not tolls, but instead selling ads along the road.

If it's funded primarily by the billboards and not by the drivers, then yes, the billboard purchasers are the real customers. And that could potentially lead to poor results, such as optimizing for billboard viewing time rather than safety and throughput.

[cromwellian]

Even if I accept your interpretation, it still doesn't justify the description "you're not the user, you're the product" In the case of the private highway example, even if the customers are the advertisers, the product being sold isn't the drivers, it's the billboard space.

Google's users are not its products. You might claim its users are not its customers (users != customers), but that does not imply the users ARE the products. Just like the New York Times readers are not the real business customers, the advertisers are, however no one has ever exclaimed "The New York Times Readers are the Products!"

The Product is the New York Times, because that is the thing _Being Produced_. It is the work product of the journalists.

Likewise, the work product of the engineers, SREs, PMs, managers, ops and support for Gmail is the Gmail Service. That is what is created out of the hours they put in. There is an ancillary product that leverages externalities produced those products (virtual real estate to auction off), but it is not people's data as the product being sold.

This meme is really tiresome because it doesn't get to the root of the matter, which is, are the incentives of those working on Google's products aligned with the incentives of the business operations which have to derive a return on those investments.

There are two ways to look at this depending on your level of cynicism:

1. Google is a smart company that looks at the long term and realizes value by the creation of positive externalities. That is, it works from the premise that if you make good products that please your users, you will retain and get more of them, and there will be opportunities to monetize that. That is, retaining users is paramount, ergo, user trust, branding, and generally not pissing off users is very important.

2. Google is a short sighted company that looks at what is currently has, lets bean counters manipulate its products purely to increase the bottom line by maximizing the amount of stuff they can sell. This means, they only consider the wishes of advertisers, and act to increase purely the amount of ads that can be shown, regardless of how much it annoys users.

Now, you can decide to believe #2 or #1 depending on how harshly you view the trajectory of Google products over the years. To be sure, they have done things that have annoyed users. But I believe, based on evidence of actually working here, that the primary impetus of engineers and product managers who guard the high level product features, that the focus is tipped towards user concerns.

[kuschku]

> billboard space.

No, the product being sold is viewers and viewing times.

Which means the highway owner will try to make sure that everyone has to use this highway for their commute, no others, and then the owner will try to make sure people drive slower, so they see more ads.

And I can tell you, Google is definitely #2. Many examples in the past showed that. Like them directly ignoring a law, and then arguing in court "but throwing away all the data we got when we violated that law would mean we’d have to collect it legally, and that would cost millions!" (Compare: Google vs. Federal Republic of Germany: Street View)

Google is definitely not user focused.

[TeMPOraL]

Then it would be fair to complain if the company was a) new, or b) it was already a typical thing to do for them. Google keeps proving otherwise; applying "you're the product" meme to them is nonsense.

[msellout]

Perhaps so, if the company was short-sighted. A company thinking for a longer time-frame would likely weight customer happiness as a very important factor for long-term profits.