Who Is Your Customer?

Posted by on 2010-10-29 in Computing

I just found (via gruber, of course) a great little article about the “real problem with Adobe” by Edwin Watkeys:

Adobe has been more interested in selling enterprises on stacks of technologies than selling craftspeople tools for quite a while. I am the only individual that I know that owns a copy of Create Suite—CS4, since I find little compelling in CS5—that I actually paid for. Everyone else is using pirated copies, subsidized education versions, or—in most cases—copies of the software provided by their employers.

The people who write the check for Adobe products are not the primary users of those products. Who are Adobe’s customers? The purchasers or the users? The dudes in Dockers and polo shirts or the dudes and dudettes in ripped jeans and t-shirts from Threadless?

And, so often, that is exactly the crux of the matter. Who does a company believe it’s customer is?

To Apple, the customer is the end user.
To Microsoft, the customer is the OEM (Dell, HTC, Samsung, and Lenovo).
To Adobe, the customer is your boss in the Enterprise.

And to Google, the customer is the advertising agency. To Google, you aren’t the customer. You are the product.