No, that still doesn't make them customers. It makes them a capital resource that Google does not have complete control over. Which is something I'm not sure Google's executives fully grasp.

It is true that there can be customer relationships, in the economic sense, even if the value exchanged is not money on either side of the relationship. But in a customer relationship, the value exchange choice is voluntary on both sides. That is not true in the case of Google and its users; Google's value exchange choices are voluntary (it decides how its search service works and what ads to show the user, and what data to harvest from user interactions), but many user choices are not (users can choose whether or not to use Google search and what terms to search for, but they cannot choose what ads they get shown or what data Google harvests from their search activity).