Bank Users, Not Money

Day 1,225, 06:39 • Published in Ireland Ireland • by amal3k

All of us are familiar with Google and what they do. Some amongst us – the IT crowd – may be more familiar with their internal processes, marketing strategy and corporate policies. What Google have done to get ahead of the crowd - and in the process dethroning all the old kings of the industry - is to revolutionize their targeting of a market by marketing in an entirely inverted way than what said industry was used to.

Products like Gmail, Reader, Picasa and so on are all entirely free. They allow the users complete control of their product, never fencing anything inside the “wall” like so many others like to do; no, they develop it, they test it and release it as a free beta for all to enjoy. In so doing, they reach out to the entire market and entice users to come in and actively contribute, ultimately producing a better product because it evolves into what the users want it to be.


Marketplaces are conversations. The user is the king, and if you don´t give him what he wants he will go elsewhere to get it. Google had the good corporate sense to recognize this and build platforms that allow users to do whatever they want, how they want, and for a price that can´t be argued with (that being zip). If you do not partake in the conversation of the marketplace, you do not communicate or listen to your market – your users - your development will quickly lose touch with what the users actually want and are willing to use, and by extension, pay for. Where Microsoft, Yahoo and so many others decided that they were the destination – “you come to me, ´cause I got what you need“ – Google decided to be a platform, enabling the market to do what they needed without restrictions from price or environment. Case in point: Google News aggregates the news feeds from all the major news websites – zero cost to Google, huge benefits for the consumer. Ad keywords are sold in an auction – the price is set by the community, and they pay what they feel it is worth, not what Google considers a true value. Google make their money through a side-door, by highly-focused advertising based on the data that we freely give them.

The tl;dr of all this is quite simply give the users control and we will use it. We will work for free if you´ll only value our contribution (and as we are the people using your product, you probably should). Try to tell us what we can and can´t do, well, we´ll do it anyway with another product – and you´ll lose our custom.


I remember when eRepublik was a platform. When it was a skeleton framework setup and the community built it into what they collectively wanted it to be (within an eRep democracy, of couse). We all know this was why the game exploded – community. V2 was supposed to be an evolution of this, a product with the fixes we asked for, with the bugs we reported having been eliminated - who remembers the tangible sense of excitement in the community during days before V2 was launched? And then the huge anti-climax? Ah, memories...

Where eRep Labs had the chance to be like Google –let the users do the development by producing ideas, then get your PHP gurus to knock out a beta product for them to play with – they decided to take the Microsoft route: decide for themselves what is good for the community, and blast it out to the market knowing they will have to accept it.

Think about it: Why would I want to use your product when we are nothing alike? I want my own goddamn service, built like I think it should be built and functioning in the way that I, as a user, want the thing to function. I don´t care what your ideas are; you are not the consumer, I am. So give me what I want or I´ll go get it elsewhere.

Microsoft lost their crown because they operated inside a walled garden. Everything locked in, no changes possible; take it or leave it. They managed to grow in this way because of the monopoly they had on the desktop market, the same as the publishing houses of old managed to grow exponentially because they controlled the printing presses, the same way the music industry exploited our love of good tunes because we couldn´t find them via any other distributor – these days are over. This is the era of Google, Spotify and Wikileaks. People have the power, and we´ll get what we want in the end. This is the era of openness.


eRepublik Labs is choosing the Microsoft way of generating revenue, fencing us in inside their proprietary system, the “my-way-or-the-highway” business model. Changes, changes, changes that nobody wants or asks for – just what the puppeteer thinks is the way to go. Nothing of benefit to the users, merely focused on increasing the bank account. eRep Labs have a monopoly at the moment because nobody has yet managed to put together a competing product of the same quality, but this pedestal, as we´ve seen, will not last forever.

Consider Microsoft and Yahoo, the music industry, Hollywood, the controlled-media empires - they are all the elderly behemoths that nobody really cares about because they tell us what we want and don´t listen to what we suggest. We have newer, more efficient, more cost-focused ways of doing things in Life 2.0 – because once we´re given control, we will exercise it. eRepublik Labs would do well at this juncture to consider acting more like a Web 2.0 company – after all, that is their industry and it´s falling down all around them.

Get with the program, señors.