Only in the sense that I'm the "product" of broadcast television, terrestrial radio, and my local free alt-weekly.
Calling someone a "product" is a great way to make a flippant jab at a company but as far as a product is something a company produces, it's just not the case.
Google, like these other companies, produces useful (to many at least) services. The way they make money on this is by selling ad space or access to my eyeballs and earholes. So to claim that users are simply "product" is misleading at best. Their "product" for me is webmail, search, navigation, and file hosting. Their "product" for other companies is space where they can reach potential customers.
So in this sense, like countless other media and information companies, access is one of their products and information services make up their other products.
False dichotomy, and just a plainly dumb and lazy statement.
To sell to advertisers Google has to get people to use its search engine and other products. To do that it has to treat users like customers in that it would rather have them be happy than not happy, at least unless it costs them too much. This is precisely the relationship that other businesses have with their traditional, simple customers.
Perhaps it is lazy, but what is dumb about the OP's statement?? Personally, I would argue that starting a comment with something as inflammatory as you just did is truly dumb.
Please stop repeating this intellectually lazy and false meme. Or go to reddit; platitudes that don't require critical thinking tend to do better there.
What is false or lazy about this? The service is free; Google makes money selling ads to users. Is this in dispute?
Pointing out that Google has little incentive to support it's users in a post about getting little support from Google seems very on-topic (but perhaps unoriginal) to me.
A loss of a user represents a loss of income for Google in both cases. The reason they have little incentive is because they don't get much per user, but that has nothing to do with where the money comes from.
> You're not Google's product, you're their supplier; one of their many millions of suppliers.
Their product is your personal information, which you supply to them in exchange for their services. The fact that you are one of many millions of suppliers (each dealing in microtransactions) means you don't have a lot of weight when you need to get help from them.
The best counter to the lazy Google meme is to think of all the companies where you are indisputably the customer and you also get awful incompetent support.
Internet service providers? Every ISP I've ever used I had to navigate their awful customer service infrastructure on multiple occasions and none of them were what I would call competent.
