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There are times when it seems that the Internet has left me behind. All the new products are seemingly targeting 13-year-old kids with 15 second attention spans.

Everyone wants to create trendy, sexy, cool products that entice and trap young, impressionable minds.

There are just two problems though -

1. It’s you and me, the unfashionable, older people, who have all the money.  
2. We’re much more dependable customers -  we won’t lose interest in a few days, we won’t get distracted as easily, and we won’t go through 5 different personality transitions in the next 5 years.  

Why are companies ignoring the most valuable customers? 

If you draw up a list of the most valuable traits in products and customers you’d get a long list including -

1. Products that generate a lot of profits. 
2. Products that require up-front payments or subscriptions.
3. Products that are priced higher or are sold in volume.
4. Customers with money.
5. Customers who know what they want.
6. Customers who will be stable, steady customers.

Yet a lot of the products released now seem to be focused on things which are just not that likely to make a ton of money -

1. Social Games are fashionable while games for which people pay $50 seem to have taken a back seat.
2. Social Networks are becoming big even though they have no money coming in.
3. Free content propped up by advertising is becoming widespread.  
4. Music streaming startups are in fashion although a lot of people don’t pay for music and iTunes has captured most of the rest.

And almost all of the new start-ups seem focused on targeting kids and teenagers.

Where are the examples of products built for actual customers?

It’d be really cool to see lots of products that fill actual needs and target actual customers.

1. The Kindle and the iPad are actually two examples – though do-good people would argue that the latter doesn’t fill any need and the former has too small of a market. 
2. There’s not one single great Baby Boomer site although they are going to be the most significant and valuable customers. 
3. Speaking of boomers where are the devices targeting them – Shouldn’t there be at least 1 device targeted at them for every 5 gadgets/toys/thingies targeted at 15 year olds?
4. The buzz and news is all about social networks and social gaming and free products.
5. When it’s not about free products it’s about open OSes even though there is little money to be made.

All the news is centered around Facebook, Twitter and other things that just aren’t very good businesses. They’re just tools to entice and lock-in users and then figure out how to monetize them later.

The ‘we’re the good guys’ marketing spin has gone out of control – to the point that people forget that these companies just want to feed their users to advertisers.

We should be glad that Apple gets a lot of coverage or we might as well have a rule – ‘No company or business that is profitable can be talked about’.

The most profitable products get little coverage

Here’s a short list of some companies that do things extremely well -

1. Apple with iPhone and iPod.
2. Microsoft with Windows and Office and Xbox Live.
3. Nintendo with Wii and DS.
4. Amazon with Amazon.com and Amazon Web Services and Kindle.
5. Google with Search. 
6. Salesforce.com with subscription software.
7. Intel with Chips.
8. Asus and Acer with netbooks.

Except for Apple none of these companies get enough coverage.

Instead we talk about Farmville (which is basically a scam) and Twitter and free iPhone Games and Facebook and various product offerings that are free or disastrous financially.

Is there an inherent bias on the Internet against making money?

The Internet seems to be the technological equivalent of crabs in a basket – pulling down any crab trying to improve its place in life.

1. It’s OK to talk about a company or product that makes zero profits. Examples are Facebook and YouTube.
2. It’s even better to talk about a company that makes no money at all. Twitter is the best example. 
3. It’s fashionable to criticize successful companies. That’s why Microsoft and Apple get a lot of criticism in certain quarters.
4. It’s most fashionable to attack anything that prevents stealing (aka sharing and goodness). DRM is evil, copyright protection is evil - anything that stops us from free-loading is evil. 

The minute a company becomes very profitable or very dominant it becomes the enemy.

Why would the Internet be so negative to successful companies?

The only logical answer would be -

On the Internet people want a company that will sacrifice itself for the greater good.

On the Internet people hate any company that is more profitable or dominant than them.

It’s some sort of evolutionary instinct where we don’t want any company to become too successful unless it’s focused on giving us things for free.

Apple used to be the darling and represent all the things that Microsoft should supposedly be.

However, as soon as Apple became wildly successful with its iPod and iPhone and the App Store it became a target.

Underneath it all – Is it just jealousy?

People come up with loads of reasons to hate successful companies -

1. Microsoft is evil because it has too much market share – It forces people to use its products (yeah – it’s forcing 90+% of a free market to use its products since forever).
2. Apple is evil because it doesn’t allow free passage into its phones and store.
3. Amazon is evil because its books have DRM and it doesn’t let people steal books.

Are these all rationalizations?

Are Open and Free and Rights just convenient crutches to hide the fact that at some level we are jealous that it was someone else and not us that built a product?

Do we want Microsoft to fail because it’s evil or because it’s making way too much money?

Coming back to Customers and Profit

This collective group negativity manifests in the priorities of new Internet companies - Instead of serving actual customers and focusing on metrics like profitability they seem to be focused either on giving away things for free or fooling customers.

In the past we had -

1. Sell a good product.
2. Make a lot of money. 

Now we seem to have one of two starkly different attitudes -

1. How do we kill ourselves creating products that we sell at unsustainably cheap prices.
2. How do we fool the largest number of people.

Often it’s the latter gift-wrapped with the former.

When did it become wrong to make money?

I seem to have missed the transition from ‘provide a valuable service to people and make money’ to ‘provide a valuable service to people and starve to death’.

On the Internet everyone is supposed to be doing things for free -

Why are people not entitled to a decent living?

Beyond that, if some people are very good, why are they not entitled to make a lot of money?

It’s really quite sad that the Internet has turned into a giant basket of crabs desperate to not let anyone or anything succeed beyond a certain point.

Filed under: thoughts Tagged: | anti-profit Internet, internet profit, lack thereof