I wrote a bit of a rant a couple months ago about companies that want to run the table on a market. There was only one link in that rant and it was to Benedict Evans who is increasingly becoming my favorite read on the Internet.
Benedict wrote a post yesterday that continues this discussion with some important additional points, including:
One of the things you're supposed to work out some time in your adolescence is that though you're the star of your own life, you're not the star of anyone else's. Some companies never work this out.
And
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.
And
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.
I could keep going but I am close to crossposting the whole thing here and I'm not really into doing that so go give the post a read on Benedicts's blog. I think he's nailed it.
