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[Weaver]

How do you use the word ‘product’ as in the sense ‘buying a product’ of ‘offering a product’ ?

My opinions are:

• To me, a product is one or more objects tangible / physical or not, so including things such as software.
• And to me a ‘service’ can not be a product.
• To me, a service is a function provided, or work carried out, usually on a continuing basis; or else an offer of a guarantee of availability for the provision of some work.

* Do you agree?

Q: I have noticed that many people seem to use the word ‘product’ for things that are not products but which are in fact services.

* What do you think?

That is, this, in my view erroneous, usage has it that everything that a company has for sale is called a ‘product’ even when it is no such thing but is in fact a service.

I have read Wiktionary’s entry on the word ‘product’, and, if I have read it correctly, that seems wholly consistent with my understand of the word. In the restricted sense of sales that is the topic here, only senses (1) and (3.1) would seem to be relevant and I can’t see anything that contradicts this.

[chenks]

can you give an example of where "product" has been used when it should have been "service"?
i tend to agree with your definitions, but can't seem to think of where i've seen it used wrong.

[tubaman]

Broadband is often sold as a product, but you don't get a physical thing you can touch so should it be a service?
 

[renluop]

isn't broadband the product of the minds of those, who 'invented' it, sold to the public as a service?

[chenks]

Broadband is often sold as a product, but you don't get a physical thing you can touch so should it be a service?
 

the content can touch you though

[Weaver]

@chenks - I’ve seen this horror so often, I’ve lost count, but I never noted the instances down. I’ll have to look out for an example. I thought that BT ‘products’ would be a place to start, so

https://www.btwholesale.com/products-and-services/data/broadband.html

This has for example "WBMC" which is a service but it has it in a row called ‘products’ in a table; in fact everything in that row is a service. Everything they sell in this market is a service.

But elsewhere it has headings/titles ‘products and services’

[sevenlayermuddle]

It’s an interesting point.  In some usage, broadband delivery in particular, the ‘service’ aspect often seems to be simply a reference to ‘customer service’, as in technical support, complaints handling, etc.

I do support the notion that a ‘product’ should ideally be a tangible thing that you can touch.   But I also find it useful, in the case of broadband, to have two different terms... one to characterise the technical specification, and one to refer to the level of human(/AI) support. 

Language does evolve, and maybe ‘product’ is evolving to be the first of these, ‘service’ the latter?

[Weaver]

The dictionary as I mentioned before has no examples that contradict my opinion, so it may be there is language change going on and the lexicographers have not picked up on it yet, or maybe they like me have regarded this as misuse, substandard English and disregarded it.

I don’t know if any dictionaries have yet listed nightmare stuff - which I have even seen on kitz iirc - such as ‘*should of done it’ and ‘would of/could of’ and I have heard it spoken on coronation street too, with a clear vowel as in ‘of’, ‘off’, not a schwa [ə] (ie the central vowel found in unstressed syllables in English, Welsh eg as in the last syllable of ‘mother’, second o in ‘coronation’). So I don’t know if dictionaries are currently intending to document nightmare developments.

FYI even 1200 years, ago Irish speakers were sometimes confusing ‘do’ meaning ‘to’ with ‘de’ meaning ‘of’ (cf Latin and French]) and writing ‘do’ for both sometimes, and this is still going on today in some parts of the Western Isles, so there’s a lot of this kind of corruption about. Btw the former, do here is cognate with eg. English to, but unstressed particles such as this had become voiced for some reason, so the word was no longer *to. And I have seen other odd things which I think are similar ancient total cock-ups too.

[sevenlayermuddle]

A thought...   

... Mathematically, the number 12 is the ‘product’ of the numbers 2 and 6.  But the number 12 is not a tangible thing we can touch, so should we forbid that it be called a ‘product’?

[Weaver]

I suspect that a product in mathematics is the result of an operation which is multiplication and the result, the product, is the answer ‘produced’. The sense of product being a thing produced is listed in the dictionary.

[renluop]

English and Danish, I understand, are not clearly enunciated tongues. This, with the vagaries of standard english spelling, does not help. TBH, I cannot get too excited or frustrated about it, though it might niggle somewhat. Literature and documents need to maintain standards with limited flexibility, but, if elsewhere the intention and meaning is conveyed and understood despite bad spelling and grammar, the job is done. I doubt the Roman legionnaire spoke or wrote Cicero's Latin. Same to day! I man writes to his bank using words 'ain't, should of and the like, should that result in a loan request being refused? I think not.

Language purism taken to the extreme would seem to make otherwise.

[roseway]

I suspect that this is misplaced pedantry. Apart from the arithmetical meaning, the noun "product" is related to the verb "produce", and means anything which is produced. Surely a service can be produced?

https://www.etymonline.com/word/product

[Weaver]

Roseway I simply disagree about the meaning of the word produce. But that’s me. Thank you for letting me know your take on it. I very much wanted to hear others’ opinions in case I was just being mad, or missing something.

And in addition I can’t imagine a service being ‘produced’. But maybe others see it differently.

If objecting to misuse of English is pedantry then I happily plead guilty. 

We all have to guess what the supposed ‘meaning’ of words is; as hearers we can only guess what is in speakers’ minds and experience helps us to fine-tune the guesswork when we are young as we are exposed to more language. How this happens in children is still very much a difficult research topic in linguistics.

[roseway]

That wasn't meant to be an insult on my part. I'm a natural pedant myself, and often metaphorically bite my tongue when I see grammatical horrors. Unfortunately they're so common that one can become very unpopular by pointing them out.

As an aside, an essay which my granddaughter wrote at school a few years ago was "corrected" by her teacher. His correction included the words "should of...". 

[Weaver]

I didn’t take it as an insult. :-)  so peace, love etc as usual 

I don’t bit my tongue now when I hear misuse of the English language or other languages for that matter.