Open Web and Owning the Customer: Cloudy....with a Chance of Meatballs
Intriguing 5 question Q & A with Google’s new Open Web advocate Chris Messina. As interviewer Drake Martinet points out Google and Open Web aren’t two terms that naturally roll together. Messina’s interview — in which he roundly criticizes Facebook for using its Connect product to try to rule the social world — makes you wonder about a couple of things.
Yes, Facebook is trying to dominate the social space, becoming its nexus. That’s what companies do. Google, as it built itself, made a case that it was just a great set of highways and superhighways, directing people, but not trying to snare them. All good fictions in Silicon Valley speak. The generation may be new, the technologies may be new, but the mantra behind the scenes is still about “owning the customer,” a phrase old media types know well. Own the customer and steady revenue streams, and better revenue shares, flow for a good time.
Now the web makes that ownership harder. Most companies feel they are lucky to rent a customer for a small time, monetizing page views here and there. From a media company point of view, that ongoing customer, owned or leased, is a great value, and we can see that in the metering/paid content pushes going forward.
For all of us, as consumers and readers, we just need places to keep our stuff, organized well and the ability to connect up all parts of our work, family, financial and social lives. We don’t really want to be owned by anyone, but we’ve got to put that stuff somewhere, and that somewhere is increasingly in the cloud. Who owns the cloud(s)? That’s almost a metaphysical question, and one clearly unanswerable today.