The term customer apply when you are in a shop, be it cars or computers and many other things. So there no link between user and customer. In the car industry they design the car for the driver first and then passengers. Not customers. The same for computer they are designed to serve the user and that why customer pay for them.

And actually in my domain, we deal with travel, mostly using a computer to book a trip, but the names we use are not user but mostly travellers. And they are not our clients. Our customers are travel agencies or airlines. But the person that use our application (the end user) are most often traveller that want to book a trip. And the distinction is important. To be successful we must serve wel our end user (travellers) but also our clients (travel agencies & airlines).

Exactly the same when you sell a plane. The customer is often an airline sometime actually a company that rent planes. The users of the plane are pilots, stewards, mechanicians as well as the passengers. Each type of user has a different role.

Even in the car, there also the car mechanic. He is another user and the car is designed in a way that car mechanic can easily repear it.

So I agree with you that "user" is quite a generic term as apposite to traveller, passenger, driver... But this has no link with the notion of customer/owner.

In computer science you have user and thanks to user rights management you actually create groups and name them as you wish depending of your use case. There the generic opposition of system administrators vs users but typically in you company you could give different right to different teams or roles. And the computers would reflect that.

Because of that, because we don't know what role the users are actually given, because users don't even need to be a person but can perfectly be computer programs, it make sense to have a very generic term and let the users own choose their names/groups.

After all in a car entertainment system the user is a driver or passenger... In a CD player, it is a listener and so on. Remember there computer in basically everything today.

The term customer applies when you are in a shop, be it selling cars or computers or many other things. So there is no link between user and customer. In the car industry they design the car for the driver first and then passengers. Not customers. The same for computers: they are designed to serve the user and that why a customer pays for them.

And actually in my domain, we deal with travel, mostly using a computer to book a trip, but the names we use are not user but mostly travellers. And they are not our clients. Our customers are travel agencies or airlines. But the person that uses our application (the end user) is most often a traveller that wants to book a trip. And the distinction is important. To be successful we must serve well our end user (travellers) and also our clients (travel agencies & airlines).

Exactly the same when you sell a plane. The customer is often an airline (sometimes actually a company that rents planes). The users of the plane are pilots, stewards, mechanics, as well as the passengers. Each type of user has a different role.

Even in the car, there also the car mechanic. He is another user and the car is designed in a way that car mechanic can easily repair it.

So I agree with you that "user" is quite a generic term unlike traveller, passenger, driver... But this has no link with the notion of customer/owner.

In computer science you have user and thanks to user rights management you actually create groups and name them as you wish depending on your use case. There is the generic opposition of system administrators vs users, but typically in your company you could give different right to different teams or roles. And the computers would reflect that.

Because of that, because we don't know what role the users are actually given, because users don't even need to be people but can perfectly be computer programs; it make sense to have a very generic term and let the users own choose their names/groups.

After all in a car entertainment system the user is a driver or passenger... In a CD player, it is a listener and so on. Remember there is a computer in basically everything today.