I think this is an inherent side effect of advertising-based revenue models. As they say "if you're not paying for it, you're the product being sold".<p>If you sell something for money, there's a single moment where your interests diverge from your customers -- when you accept payment. But the rest of you customer interactions are all about adding value.
We might be more focused on getting people to do things, but it doesn't need to be just about getting people to sign up for things. We can also use software to make people behave better, to make people's lives better.<p>Just yesterday there was a post from Grouper talking about how they figured out basically a hack to get people not to flake out (<a href="http://blog.joingrouper.com/intro-to-social-hacking-how-we-lowered-our-ca" rel="nofollow">http://blog.joingrouper.com/intro-to-social-hacking-how-we-l...</a>). Anil Dash talks about using technology to create more civil conversations on the web (<a href="http://dashes.com/anil/2011/07/if-your-websites-full-of-assholes-its-your-fault.html" rel="nofollow">http://dashes.com/anil/2011/07/if-your-websites-full-of-assh...</a>). If you ask me, those are good developments and we should focus more on figuring out how to create online communities that are best. That may involve some manipulation but it may all be for the best.
I agree with author whole-heatedly that the software-development industry has shifted from manipulating machines to manipulating people. Writing software today is more about the content that the software provides than about figuring out how to make that actual software work.<p>Any modern web-based business must think of themselves as a media company. The software designers must ask themselves not how can I make something happen, but what content should I deliver to my users. There has been a paradigm shift in the industry. The code and how it works is irrelevant, and what matters most is the media that your service offers.<p>The author seems to wish that this weren't so, but unfortunately it is. I wish it weren't so, but it is. There does not seem to be any way around the issue.
1) Why is manipulating people inherently bad? The author simply throws:<p>> "The downside to this model is it that the company’s and user’s interests can never be aligned because the user is not the one paying for the product."<p>But he doesn't expand on it. To get users you still need a good product even if it's free or users would use something else. Part of the lessons behind increasing click through rates is to build a desirable user experience. The users are not wiring you money directly, but they're still worth money indirectly. Just saying "every free product must be bad for the consumer" sounds like a simplistic over-generalization.<p>2) How is every business not manipulating people instead of just machines? There isn't a black or white here. You don't manipulate machines simply out of love to build a genius technological innovation. You do it to manipulate people. Each piece of hardware or line of code is put in place trying to solve the same questions the author poses for manipulating people. Which GPU I need for users to buy games? Which algorithm gives better recommendations that the user will actually click on? Businesses manipulate machines while manipulating people. Only hobbyists do otherwise.<p>3) Is he using Apple as an example of a company who favors manipulating machines over people? Apple are the most extreme example of the contrary. They're genius at manipulating people. Many here will point out their technology are just small evolution over what existed before. But it's their genius marketing, branding and expert people manipulation skills that convince users their products are status symbols worth of their loyalty. And there's nothing wrong with these. Every business wish they had the people expertise that Apple does. That's what make businesses work. It's genius people skills that brings genius machine skills into user's hands.
Advertising is all about manipulating people. Furthermore successful advertising is all about making the perceived voluntary cost to the user smaller than the perceived value to the advertiser. If you took Facebook's revenue and divided it by the number of users, I'm guessing they would lose a lot of customers by charging that amount as a subscription fee.<p>If you don't advertise, you need to charge money.<p>If you charge money, and a competitor launches with successful advertising, then you will go out of business since the perceived cost for their users is lower than what you need to charge to stay in business.
"I wonder what a company like Facebook could build if it could treat its users as customers instead of products."<p>Not exactly sure that treating users as customers is better by much than treating them as products. How about treating users as users and let it flow from there?
I was expecting an article on management styles. I left a firm after it was taken over by people who wanted absolute control of behavior. This was attained through Bolshevist Change Management meetings and mandatory ITIL course attendance. ITIL, for those who don't know, is the Information Technocracy Indoctrination Library, a collection of smug, manipulative, platitudinous and mind-numbingly boring volumes that serve as an outlet for the frustrated British Colonialist impulse, and all this implies (think Parkinson's law).