Typically sharp and incisive piece by Benedict Evans on the tendency for companies to think, and talk, about owning their customers. He relates this specifically to Google Glass but the point relates to all and every business that slips into using a possessive to describe the nature of their relationship with people who use their products or services
In other words, your customers’ relationships with you are the only relationships you have as a business and you think a lot about them. But you’re one of a thousand things your customer thinks about in a week, and one of dozens of businesses. And they probably have their own ideas about how they want to engage with you (though they wouldn’t put it in those words) – assuming they think about you at all.
He contributes
You can think of people as users or customers – but they’re not yours. They don’t belong to you, and they may barely even care that you exist. The old Google rejoiced in sending people away from the site as fast as possible, because the result mattered, not the search. Glass points to a risk of forgetting that.
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