I never thought to make friends with people who's only common thing with me is that they shop at the same place. Companies creating a "community" is exactly as you described.
I am an interested party in the process space, and I think that's ungenerous. When you work with a complex tool every day, and you have to find solutions for this or that issue, develop strategies for this or that business case, etc etc, you're not really shopping - it's more like you're in the trenches. At that point, finding people who have the same issues and talking shop with them, can be great for both knowledge exchange and camaraderie. Linux wouldn't be what it is today without the LUGs era, for example.
We're talking about private companies running forum software instead of providing support. We're not talking about the power of IRC or mailing list communities for open source projects and the like.
If I pay for something I want the person I pay money to help me fix problems I get.
