I think Patrick picked the numbers quite intentionally and in light of that the comparison to spam doesn't hold water. Bob is said to be the 1 annoyed user out

I think Patrick picked the numbers quite intentionally and in light of that the comparison to spam doesn't hold water. Bob is said to be the 1 annoyed user out of 100. In other words, 99% of people are finding the emails useful. That's the argument at least. Spam, on the other hand, is far to the other extreme. Way more than 99% of recipients don't find those emails useful (not to mention they were unsolicited emails). e.g. "After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(electronic)#Cost-benefit_analyses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(electronic)#Cost-benefit...