Those pesky customers

Ning co-counder Marc Andreessen in a speech for analysts about Sun products says that one of their customers had the audacity to come to their office. For shame. This is the sort of thing you need to nip in the bud, or else you might have customers start becoming fans of your company. And you wouldn’t want that.

Says Andreessen…

Ideally we’ll never meet any of our customers. We actually had to take the sign down from our front door because one of our customers actually stopped in, uninvited, and said, “Hi, I love your service.” And we’re like, “why are you here?” And so down came the sign.

Drop-bys like that should only happen in sitcoms as far as I’m concerned… The consumer internet businesses in a sense are ideal businesses from the standpoint of never meeting your customers.

See the video (it’s about two minutes in).

Sorry that us pesky customers bother you so much, Marc. We’ll try and stop that.