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I don't think it's accurate to say that users are only a capital resource. The users are still customers for Google, even if they are not explicitly paying out

I don't think it's accurate to say that users are only a capital resource. The users are still customers for Google, even if they are not explicitly paying out of their own wallets for the service -- they are free to walk away at any time. Google has to keep both the users and the advertisers 'happy enough' if they want to succeed. The article highlights that the bar to keep the users 'happy enough' is fairly low.

pdonis 3y ago
> The users are still customers for Google, even if they are not explicitly paying out of their own wallets for the service -- they are free to walk away at any time. No, that still doesn't make them customers. It makes them a capital resource that Google does not have complete control over. Which is something I'm not sure Google's executives fully grasp. It is true that there can be customer relationships, in the economic sense, even if the value exchanged is not money on either side of the relationship. But in a customer relationship, the value exchange choice is voluntary on both sides. That is not true in the case of Google and its users; Google's value exchange choices are voluntary (it decides how its search service works and what ads to show the user, and what data to harvest from user interactions), but many user choices are not (users can choose whether or not to use Google search and what terms to search for, but they cannot choose what ads they get shown or what data Google harvests from their search activity).