t-minus

A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human. - Alan Turing

In my first post on users, customers, etc. as friends, I touched on the idea that anyone who gives money, time, or positive attention to your business should be considered a friend and treated as such. There are no users or customers from this vantage point.

Some may consider this a noble (but unattainable) goal or just too fluffy an idea to implement in any meaningful fashion. I'll actually provide some real world examples in my next few posts, but first I want to touch on the state of the nation, how things tend to go in our daily business interactions.

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Some might say we’re a self-centered lot, trying to carve ourselves a slice of old-school Atari Labs heaven.

Naturally, we care about us, as Maslow indicates you’ve got to take care of yourself first, but we also care a lot about Them. In fact, one of my main concerns at Go flight! is making sure things are good for Them.

The Mysterious Them

Some call them users, customers, clients, guests, visitors, eye-balls, click-throughs, hapless suckers, or droplets in the market share bucket – but all these conceptions leave something to be desired, either because they are needlessly distant, too focused on the monetary exchange portion of the relationship, exploitative, disingenuous, or just plain mean.

All of them are off the mark if you want to feel good about what you do and you want Them to feel good about how you do it. Ask yourself this question, do you want to be called any of these labels at any web site, box store, or popsicle stand you visit? We all tolerate them, but to me they always come off sounding funny. We're doing this for the customers, visitors, or eye-balls doesn't sound very inspiring either.

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