Every human using Google is a customer. For most customers, the product is search results, and their payment is to let part of their screen be occupied by ads. For advertisers, the product is X pixels of advertising text, and the payment is dollars (or euros, or yen, etc).
Currently, the exchange rate between pixels and dollars is so extreme that it's not cost-effective to provide support to those customers who are only paying in pixels. Customers who pay in dollars (advertisers are one, but also people who have a paid Gmail account, or have bought more Drive storage, etc) do receive support.
---
But that's all beside the point. The original story is about someone who paid hundreds of dollars for a phone, and received terrible support. Even if you hold the position that all free services are inherently exploitive, don't you think that someone who spent that much money should be receiving top-quality support?
It is useful to distinguish transactions that involve money from transactions that don't, and to restrict the word "customer" to apply only to those situations where money is exchanged, if for no other reason than that only in situations where money is exchanged is it clear who is the customer: it's the person who pays.
Google's advertisers are its customers. The (attention of the) people doing the searches are the product. Search results are the means by which the product is procured, not unlike the bait on the fisherman's hook.
A doctor and an armed mugger are different because even though in both cases they are given money in exchange for life, the doctor's patient[1] consented to do so.
Also, restricting customers to people who pay with money excludes transactions based on bartering or favors. If I design a nice website for someone and they give me a bottle of wine, that's still a customer relationship even though no money has changed hands.
[1] Or their guardian, legal representative, etc.
And that summary judgement follows a familiar pattern: 'This is meant to be insightful, but actually... let me show how the prevailing wisdom is wrong, with my new improved analysis'
The problem here, is that you're trying to be too clever in order to stretch words beyond their common usage.
Some personal perspective: Myself and the rest of the EA (Enterprise Architecture) team at my prior company spent almost a month painfully debating the meaning of word "Customer". Yes, I know, crazy and yet we had good reason for the corporate dictionary to be accurate. Financial control systems and exec reporting relied on it. But I digress, and while I can't remember the exact definition we used, the essential fact is:
A customer pays for goods or services.
It doesn't matter if they use dollars, bitcoins, or bushels of corn. Nearly all users of Google are NOT customers, and indeed do form part of the product offering, as the OP stated.
Additional references:
"A customer (also known as a client, buyer, or purchaser) is the recipient of a good, service, product, or idea, obtained from a seller, vendor, or supplier for a monetary or other valuable consideration. [1][2]
For your position (that ad-supported implies searcher is not the customer) to be correct, there would have to be some minimum amount of cost involved before a human can become a customer. Say the search engine charges one dollar per query. The searcher must be the customer, obviously. What if the search engine charges one a penny per query? Is the searcher still the customer? What about one thousandth? One millionth?
At what point does the searcher's expenditure fall so low that you consider them to be a product, rather than a human?
---
Aside:
Apart from my day job, I write a lot of software. Some of it is made available for use for no monetary charge, and supported by ads. I do not consider the humans who use my software to be "products", nor the advertisement networks to be "customers". To say that someone is a product just because they don't want to pay money for something strikes me as borderline sociopathic.
True
> It doesn't matter if they use dollars, bitcoins, or bushels of corn.
Or, say, personal information that can be used in targeting advertising.
> Nearly all users of Google are NOT customers
I'd describe them a suppliers, but unless you've suddenly decided that, contrary your early statement, it does matter what they provide in exchange for the services they receive, they can also, by your logic, be described accurately as "customers".
> and indeed do form part of the product offering, as the OP stated
No, the users do not form part of the product offering; the slave trade is not part of Google's business models.
They are suppliers of inputs (both information used in targeting advertising, and the advertising opportunities through which the actual advertising is delivered being the key pair of inputs) that are used in Google's product offerings; insofar as these inputs are exchanged for services Google provides rather than for cash payment, they are also customers purchasing those services in a non-cash exchange.
At the end of the day, real estate on a screen is means to an end, not the ultimate end itself. The ultimate end is of course money, which is paid by advertisers. The means to an end is more properly viewed as a factor of Google's production than an end itself.
I would distinguish linguistically by saying that I am a user of google's products, but not a customer. A customer pays.
What Google does is use information it receives from users to sell targeted advertising impressions in services that the users use. The users are suppliers -- both of the information and the advertising opportunities -- rather than either "customers" or "products".
I think you mean "catchphrases."
They get less individualized attention then either customers or many other kinds of suppliers because there are lots of suppliers of the same inputs and the marginal value of each one of them to Google's business is very, very low, such that spending significant resources on direct support would very quickly turn them into a net liability.
Why must it be one or the other?
