[wpietri]

Exactly. Serving people directly strongly encourages a focus on delivering real value, because the user and the purchaser are the same.

Serving people indirectly allows for all sorts of other approaches that work in the short term. If purchasing decisions are mainly driven by our sales guys and their executives, it slows and distorts a key feedback loop.

I once heard a story about SurveyMonkey that I love. They got their start very much on the self-serve end. But eventually the CFO of Oracle saw all these credit card charges from individual Oracle employees using it, went to SurveyMonkey, and said, "Create an enterprise tier for us." SurveyMonkey looked at what it would take in terms of engineering and said, "Sorry, we have other priorities right now."

The way I heard it, the Oracle CFO, not used to being told no, sent forth an edict: From now on staff were not to use SurveyMonkey, but some other product that Oracle did have an enterprise deal with. Sounds like bad news for SurveyMonkey! Except that the other product wasn't very good, and SurveyMonkey wasn't that much anyhow, so people just went on using and expensing it.