Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by beat 4697 days ago
What do you mean by "users"? A business has to have customers, at least in the long run. Those customers may or may not be the people who actually use the products (Google/Facebook/Yahoo/etc - you're not the customer, you're the product). But whether you're making tires or milk or websites or religious experiences or whatever, you have a product, and someone is using it.
1 comments

I doubt anybody at Goodyear or B.F. Goodrich talk about people who buy their tires as "users". To my way of thinking, saying "users" implies something very specific about the nature of the business in question... eg, Google and Facebook have "users", whereas Goodyear, Proctor & Gamble, and Alcoa have "customers" (or "accounts").