What do you call the people you write software for?

For most of my career I have referred to the people who I write software for "users".  It just made sense, they are using the software so they are users?

Interestingly enough at Amazon we call them customers.  Not to say that the word user has been stricken entirely from the vocabulary, but it makes me wonder if it should.  Here is my thinking.  Something different happens in my mind when I think of the people I am writing software for when I use the word customer.  It is hard to describe...but maybe this story will help you understand what I mean...

When I worked at Microsoft I worked in the consulting division and we would help people make sense of the variety of ways to write code on the Windows platform.  Often times some of my customers (aka clients) would have come up with a unique way to solve a problem using some piece of Microsoft software.  When I would relate this back to the product team (another aspect of my job).  More times than not the question I would get back would be "why would they do that - that is not what we intended".  We used to refer to this as the RDZ - reality distortion zone; which was the invisible field that hung over Redmond that prevented the product teams from understanding how people really used Microsoft product.

When I think about how a customer centric Microsoft would have been different - then the response back to me would have been something like "that is really cool, we never thought of that - how can we make it better".

Try it.  It may just change the way you think about things.

Possibly the Most Useless Code Post

Need a quick and dirty way to take an element normal XML file and turn it into a CSV file.  I know I could create something from scratch, but was hoping for a jump start on this since I am in a big hurry.

So I find this post.

This person gives me the code to take XML and turn it into CSV for his/her XML only!  Geez how useless is that?

I guess it just bugs me because I have been doing lots of interview code reviews and if I saw this I would laugh and hit the DO NOT HIRE button for this person.  Which has actually happened.  Sigh.