Let’s Have Some Perspective, People

So this guy made an iPhone app called “I Am Rich,” which does nothing but show an image of a red gemstone– presumably a ruby. He priced it at $999.99 and managed to get it added to the iPhone App Store.

The "I Am Rich" application icon

When I first heard about this, I thought “hmmm, I guess some people with too much money might want that, as a sort of joke-but-not-really-’cause-look-i’m-so-rich-i-spent-a-grand-on-a-joke.” Or maybe even because they wanted it for its face-value function. Y’know, kind of like any other useless luxury item. People go for that shit. “Look at my gold fingernail clipper with the inset diamond hinge.”

It never occurred to me to get angry at the guy who made the app. I’m still bewildered by the furor.

It’s gotten enough attention that the New York Times has written a story about the whole deal. According to the NYT, the guy who made the app’s been getting hate mail– “Mr. Heinrich was bombarded with e-mail and phone messages, “many of them insulting,” he said.”

Come on now. Really? Yelling at a dude because you “fell” for his joke/art? It did exactly what it said it would do, and it cost exactly as much as it told you it would. It’s the iPhone equivalent of touching a land mine to see if it will go off. It’s pretty and cute, and I know it’s going to kill me, but there must be some way I can try it out and get back to cover if what I know is true actually turns out to really be true.

A modern land mine. I assume the dude isn't going to poke it with that wand...

I use the land mine analogy, which essentially compares stupidly wasting money you didn’t deserve to have in the first place with being rent limb from limb by buried explosives because that’s how important this subject is.

Judging by the amount of press, anyway.

And all this hoopla for 8 people– “I Am Rich” was purchased a grand total of 8 times. So the hooplateers are offended just on principle that anyone would dare create such an application and sell it on the holy App Store. That lofty perch must be reserved for fifteen different applications that all emulate a flashlight. Some of which actually would have you pay them money, more money than it costs to buy a real flashlight, for the privilege of using an application to set your backlight to its highest setting and turn the screen white.

Of course, Apple doesn’t give you a way to try out an iPhone app. Once you’ve bought the app, you’re kind of screwed if it’s terrible. Don’t go purchasing any of those $40 industry-specific applications unless you know they’re going to suit your need. So there is some room for criticism of high-priced applications on that basis.

Nintendo does the same thing. You can’t try out the games on the Wii shop, you just have to spend the ten bucks for SPOGS Racing and then spend the next hour cursing at Nintendo for loose quality control. SPOGS Racing is really horrible.

But anyway, I’m having a  hard time dealing with the fact that

• a) people give a crap about “I Am Rich” and that
• b) the crap they give is flung at the developer instead of idiots who clicked the app to install it and then have the nerve to claim they’ve been scammed, and that
• c) people are really as stupid as I always knew they were.

Maybe my real problem is that this time I can’t just shrug and be all cynical, because this time people are being stupid in a completely different way than I expected. Like when you kick that landmine and it springs up and decapitates the guy next to you, and you get off with only an amputation or two.

Don’t confuse users with customers

This post on Web 2.0/Startup focused blog “Mashable” seems to make a classic mistake.

A fellow got locked out of his Google account, and couldn’t get the company to respond to his requests for support.

This guy’s experience sucks and Google should fix it, but maybe not exactly for the reasons that you. Always remember that unless you’re paying somebody money, you’re a user, not a customer. Customers pay for service, and Google’s customers are by and large, advertisers.

I have a hunch that Mashable and the commenters on that post are confusing being a user of a Web site with being a customer of that Web site.

One could argue that you are a customer of Google’s because you see the ads they serve. But from that perspective your actions contribute such a negligible amount of value in that manner that it’s not economical for Google to care that much about what happens to individuals. Your Lifetime Value as a viewer of Google advertisements probably doesn’t add up to the hour it’ll take some technician to fix your problem.

Ads are paid for in “CPM”– that means “Cost Per Thousand” views. The “M” stands for a thousand; I presume they use roman numerals for some reason you could look up on Google. So an advertiser gets paid every thousand times you view a page. Over your lifetime, you will view thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of pages of ads. But even though Google doesn’t release the prices of their ads, and some ads are worth more than others, lemme tell you that it doesn’t cost all that much to buy a view thousand CPM ad. So Google’s gotta weigh the probable value of your ad-viewing vs. the time it’ll take to fix your problem.

Actually, they weigh the average value of the average user vs. the average time it takes to fix the average account problem. Apparently, that calculation adds up to only a certain amount of customer support per single-user-affecting incident. They do try, as the Mashable post attests, but they don’t try very hard.

In the case of this poor guy locked out of his account, as Rob mentions below, he’s actually a paying customer of Google– he pays for extra storage. Does the calculation still return a result of ignore-him-’til-he-goes-away? I think it might.

Google isn’t necessarily looking to create the most robust and dependable service online, even when you’re willing to pay them for it. I think Google’s primary focus is page views, and throwing things onto the Web that will increase their page views as much as possible. So the calculation of “should we go the extra mile to fix an individual extra-storage customer’s problem” probably still comes out negative.

Do you think advertisers on Google’s network suffer the same lack of response to their problems?

Now, if everybody on Gmail got locked out, well then Google would respond, because it would impact their volume in a tangible way and pinch their REAL customers in a very painful place. Even then, the user clamor would only be a telltale alert that the ruckus that really matters is on its way from the corner where huddle the wretched masses of businesses whose ads weren’t being served. Ads they pay for in advance.

[Note: I failed to notice in the Mashable post that the person in question pays Google for storage, so now instead of being certain about whether the poster and commenters are making that "classic mistake", the post now just assumes they are and makes its silly point anyway.]