> Googles customers are the advertisers I see this repeated over and over again, but that's simply not true. The problem is that people treat such relationship

> Googles customers are the advertisers I see this repeated over and over again, but that's simply not true. The problem is that people treat such relationships as if it's a zero sum game. But to make an analogy and please bear with me, if you look in nature at a natural food-chain, the relationship between the carnivore and the herbivore and then between the herbivore and the grass that it eats is not zero-sum at all, being actually a synergetic relationship, continuously creating value (in nature this means life). It's a wonderful relationship, with the grass storing sun energy into calories that can be consumed. And the carnivore wouldn't survive without that grass, as no grass means no herbivores left to be eaten. And the herbivores themselves depend on the existence of a natural enemy, otherwise they'd breed too much and quickly deplete their food source. Now skipping over the cultural taboos we have over the relationship between hunter and pray, there's something to be said about the synergies in a food-chain that apply to economic systems just as well. You can say that Google's customers are the advertisers and by that implying that its users are actually the product that they are selling. But the truth is more complex than that. Because users are not produced on an assembly line, like Apple is producing its hardware. Users have a mind of their own and can install ad-blockers or can switch to other products and services if you piss them off. For these reasons users are not a commodity. And so the fact is that users along with advertisers are Google's customers, being in a synergetic relationship. Of course, if money change hands that's even better and note Google's forays into the subscription based model, along with Google Apps or YouTube Red. And by your logic, Apple's customers are the carriers and the app developers, which is actually true but note that the interests of the carriers and of app developers can also be in conflict with the interests of Apple's users. Have you noticed that your carrier can disable your right to create a Wifi hotspot with your iPhone? Because I did. Back to Google, their genius is that they recognized this synergy and played in the interests of everybody. Well, at least in the times of Eric Schmidt. It all went downhill when Vic Gundotra led the Google+ effort. I don't know what's this tendency to hire management from Microsoft, but along with the likes of Stephen Elop I'm seeing a pattern. Anyway, lately I've been dissatisfied with Gmail's support for standards, so I decided that I don't want to encourage a monoculture and switched to FastMail. I hope they'll return to their strategy from the days of Eric Schmidt, because if trust is lost amongst us techies, then it's really hard to regain it - see Microsoft - and us techies are quite an influential bunch.