GetSatisfaction's open letter to Jason Fried
blog.getsatisfaction.com
blog.getsatisfaction.com
"37signals decided to handle their web-support by themselves. You can reach them at <url>".
Their site is build upon a conception about "big evil companies", thor said that himself in the so called open letter. So it makes every company on their site that hasn't suscribed to their thing an evil one by definition.
Now don't get me wrong, this can be very good, when it is true. And very bad and harmfull when it isn't
This is not a technical issue. This is a structural flaw into the conceptual design of their website, so maybe they meant no harm, but that's not the point at all.
If they can't fix it, it would probably be better for everyone if they went down. On a brighter note, it's probably not that hard to fix. But it needs to be taken very seriously.
Also i don't buy the garrett dimon line, even if i understand his motivations. Those companies also leave in a world where they have very real possibilities of harming each others.
So in the end, the fact that they're "really good people" is totally emotional and strictly not related to the issue in place here.
And the fact that they're willing to fix, while a good thing, is also tied in my opinion with the fact they did a mistake that could have hurt anybody in the community.
So this is not 'nice' of them, it's just well, the regular attitude to have !
They may find out that big, well advised companies that stay within the law can crush little start-up companies without good legal advice like bugs.
Of course that is the point!
Intention is important, not just actions. It makes a world of difference.
Every business is "flawed" in some sort of way - if only because they all aim to trounce their competition and make money. But there's a whole lot of difference between a business that willfully takes unethical steps that they know are morally wrong, and one that merely makes a mistake.
Until I see proof that the GetSatisfaction team is actually a collection of thugs, I will believe the various reports that indicate they're just like the rest of us - nice, smart guys trying to solve a real problem as well as they can.
I'm not saying intentions are not important. I'm saying what you get as an outside observer is the facts, not the intentions.
GS business is directly built upon the existence of other societies, particularly internet related ones. It's actually the whole purpose of the site. So , as nice as they may be, they DO have a responsability about what they do with the image of theses societies, and a way bigger one than anyone's else site wich is not making added value with the society's technical support, or lack thereof.
This responsability is real, and they failed at assuming it. That doesn't make them thugs, or mafia or anything, unless we have proof of such things ;)
But it does make them pretty irresponsible people, since they failed on the particular point that is supposed to be the key of their business !
Now i'm not saying it's dramatic or anything. They're probably nice people. I'm just saying than saying sorry, even with the nicest of attitudes,and changing this banner, isn't gonna cut it until they make all the changes needed to adress every point made on 37s.
Also i don't think it's particularly nice to play the card of "We're a nice little harmless startup, we're struggling, don't throw bad words at us".
They did real harm. In what proportions, that is difficult to estimate. I probably would have thought along the same lines as the guys from 37s, wich do not have a duty to play nicely with people that , besides all you could say about their niceness, still potentially harmed their business.
Also, isn't downvoting supposed to be used for offensive posts, and if so, how were our posts offensive ?
Taking a leaf from that book, 37-Signals do have great power, with SvN, which is a very influential blog read by many people in the start-up ecosystem. They should then also have the responsibility to use that influence for good, not evil. Viciously attacking another start-up without warning is not a good action.
A big difference between GS and 37S there is that GS can plausibly suggest that this was unintentional, whereas 37S actively published this attack on their blog.
So where intention is concerned, 37S are the bad guys.
Well, at least now they know how Jason (and potentially thousands of other committed teams) felt.
Thanks Jason I say.
Did you contact them?
I must admit it's a pretty impressive model regardless. It's like something Mr Burns would come up with :)
OT: It reminds me of Obama's response when criticized about spending explosion: "Well, my critics clearly have short memories. The republicans increased spending dramatically, too!"
Looks like Jason Fried managed to bring out the worst in our community :-( It's particularly galling to see this turn on a pretty decent start-up like GetSatisfaction.
This premise keeps being bandied around by GS defenders here and elsewhere, and I'd really like to hear the logic behind it.
I separate willful misbehaving from bad judgment and mistakes. Startups are like children- they flail around and make mistakes (lord knows mine does!). If a child/startup does something bad without intending to do evil, I think a quiet correction is a good idea.
Example: A child spills juice all over the floor in a classroom. Is it right for an influential classmate announce his clumsiness to the class and lecture the class on how sticky juice on the floor is a terribly thing, inconveniencing everyone? If spilled juice is a big deal, you could STILL go public with a, "Hey, Billy didn't mean it-- but this is a good opportunity to discuss the perils of spilled juice and why we should be so careful with out juiceboxes".
If the act was a result of malice or shameful neglect, then I think a public thrashing is more appropriate. GS clearly fucked up, but I think there are plenty of scenarios where that fuckup could've been a result of a hurried design/review process, an errant employee, or just plain bad judgment. You can read the founder's letter describing how the design decisions happened ( http://blog.getsatisfaction.com/2009/03/31/open-letter-to-ja... ). It's a pretty credible story.
It doesn't excuse the mistake, but it should make us lean towards leniency in the punishment-- especially considering that all of us are in the same boat (37s, HN Founders, etc).
A lot of it comes down the the style of the attack by 37s and the influence they wield. Vigilante mobs are easy to summon but hard to dismiss. The internet is forever, so if you damage a party (or damage them way more than they deserve), it's very hard to repair.
IMO, one of the biggest problems with the human race is that we don't seek to understand before we condemn. I'd kinda hoped that the HN community would give a startup that's pretty clearly trying NOT to be evil here the benefit of the doubt.
Not only that, but they'll be much more careful in the future (when the dust settles). All of us --- customers and companies --- will be better off for this experience.
I'm afraid that to me the whole scenario and fallout more resembles one child poking another in the eye with a pencil, followed by all the child's friends complaining about how the kid totally cried and went to the teacher...and the first kid griping about tattle-tales even as he promises to be more careful with his pencil in the future.
GS has gotten bad press for actual things that it has done. It doesn't matter that they're just a few guys, or that they're a bunch of awesome people who mean no wrong, as many of their defenders insist. They did things that quite fairly deserve askance looks and criticism, and their burden will be to correct those things and attempt to earn back any lost confidence. Comparing this to a "vigilante mob" is hyperbolic, distasteful, and rather fanboyish.
EDIT: Or, to put it another way - nobody likes having their business criticized. People even dislike seeing businesses they really like criticized. When the criticisms are valid, though, it's time to stop arguing against them, even in the passive aggressive manner of saying things like "We all know what it’s like to feel manipulated," (emphasis in original) and just promise to do better.
Companies such as that is vitally necessary. If you ever had dealings with a large shit company you would understand (e.g. a company that does not pick up the phones). The relationship between a large company and a consumer is completely asymmetrical.
Most companies can only be encouraged if they receive bad publicity. I do not have experience with GS but I have with a similar site (http://www.hellopeter.co.za ).
Also, it is a free speech issue - if customers of a company wants to voice their complaints about a company it is their right - GS only provides a platform for that.
EDIT: There are some companies (e.g. telephone companies, bad webhosts and banks) whose relationship with the customer is that of apathy or hate. Sites like the above is vitally necessary for that.
Some companies also have a customer service model that is based on crises management and extinguishing fires. To get your problem handled you have to create as big as a fire for them to encourage them to respond.
True, but I was not saying they weren't.
"Also, it is a free speech issue"
No, it is not. Nobody here has said GS shouldn't exist or be able to collect complaints about companies. They've only criticized them for doing things that verged on impersonating those companies by making official-looking "customer support" pages for them.
The only anti-free speech remarks made have been those by a very few people accusing Fried of defamation.
2 wrongs don't make a right, but the second wrong also doesn't excuse the first.
In other words, no one is perfect but that doesn't mean we don't, at times, have the right to call out other people's mistakes–especially when they overlap into our own lives/businesses.
I know these situations are tough, but Thor spends way too much in the letter promoting and PRing instead of apologizing and fixing.
Of course, there's a very good reason for that: saying "Sorry" can be cited as a possible admission of guilt. Really, it looks like GS is trying to establish a public record that they acted quickly to resolve these problems without admitting wrongdoing at any point.
That isn't behavior that's very consistent with "smart, but naive guys at a startup". If they didn't run out and get a lawyer and have him/her start looking over their copy and responses to the blog post, then they're more sophisticated than their defenders give them credit for.
Do you have to use the word "sorry" to express regret/"mea culpa"? All of that stuff felt pretty apologetic to me (comments, blog posts, etc).
As to your question, yes, you do have to say "sorry" or "I apologize". You also have to avoid criticizing those you've wronged while doing so and in subsequent statements on the matter.
"I have to be honest: All of these charges of extortion are distressing for someone who has worked so hard to try and encourage open and honest communication between companies and customers. I know that the pile-on effect is in effect here, but to hear it told in these comments, we’re evil people who are trying to exploit people in the worst way. We’ve always been simply trying to help improve the way companies do their customer service and make it more human. We apparently need to be better at explaining the way it works, I suppose.
"And now, I’ll step aside and dodge the bottle I see sailing through the air in my direction."
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1650-get-satisfaction-or-...
It's the attempts to evoke pity for them and cast any criticism as mindless persecution by people who aren't smart enough to get them that create more hostility. When you're in the wrong, it's just not time to go on about how you feel hurt by people being critical of you.
More appropriate would be, "We work very hard at trying to encourage open and honest communication between companies and customers. For that reason, I find it very distressing that our efforts could strike people as evil or extortionate. That is not in any way our intent, and we are looking at ways to better explain how what we do works."
All of them had a strong tone of "mea culpa"/regret even if some of them didn't use the word sorry.
I have a little bit of crisis management experience. What works is telling people you screwed up. That leaves no room to argue about whether you screwed up. What doesn't work is trying to get your side of the story out first. That leaves a whole lot of room to argue about stuff.
I am mystified as to why GetSatisfaction wants this controversy to rocket to the top of Google's search results. Why aren't they just killing this stupid story?
I think they are probably just so eager to eat their own dogfood (open, transparent conversation) that they just can't stop.
The PR reaction is a different (and really interesting) conversation. Someone oughta write a blog post about it... ;-)
It's interesting the extent to which emotions and self-control are the deciding factors here; it's clearly important to be seen to feel, but also to be in control of your emotions.
EDIT: or for that matter, hatred of 37Signals.
Makes some good points about what would have been a better way to handle this, including this particularly important truism:
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by ignorance.
What if something can't be adequately explained by ignorance?
or a product pitch.
I'm sorry, but them's fighting words.
At a cursory glance, it isn't entirely obvious that Get Satisfaction is unofficial. Further, particularly for new companies, Get Satisfaction might end up with better PR than the official support forums! While there is value for the consumer in having off site forums that a company can't control, compare this to reseller ratings. On the latter, there is no chance you'll think you're on an official company page. Get Satisfaction seems to me to go to lengths to give that impression.
- The title is "Unofficial customer service & support for 37signals on Get Satisfaction".
- The wording has been changed from "37signals has not commited to open conversation..." to "No one from 37signals has sponsored, endorsed or joined the conversation on Get Satisfaction yet. Employees may sign up here."
- The top of the page has large text that reads "Unofficial Customer Support Community for 37signals"
So Get Satisfaction deserves some credit for changing its ways.
They deserve a little credit for changing it so quickly, but I see no reason why I should feel sorry for them now.
They clearly apologized, said how they would do things differently in response, and then did those things. I'm not sure what more you can expect of human beings.
There may be other aspects to their business model that remain questionable, so yes, take them to task for those (apparently they left the fee for taking competitors adds off the page in place, for example). But I do not think talking about how their actions make you feel is especially productive.
At the risk of answering for someone else...At this point, I would summarize most of the criticisms of Fried and defenses of GS as "The good, kind people of GS are being bullied by 37Signals." So, those people.
Another way of seeing it is that if you make ignorance "totally OK now", you just make it way too easy for actual malice to get away with more.
Grown-up people, and certainly companies, should be held responsible for their actions regardless of their motive or lack of it, so that they act responsibly towards themselves and others.
In many legal settings, saying "Oops, I was ignorant," or (today) "April Fools" wouldn't be a defense against various forms of liability. The leaders of a business corporation have to make sure that their employees (their agents, by common law) aren't doing illegal acts.
When people complain about someone publicly criticizing a venue for public criticism, I have to wonder about their thought processes.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=541831
Paul also writes in his startup FAQ:
"The one book we encourage startup founders to read is Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. It's critically important for anyone in business."
If you read that (or listen to it as an audio book, as I did) you get that one of the central points is: don't put people on the defensive.
Guy Kawasaki in Art of the Start has a paragraph labeled "Wait When You Hate":
"Although you should always answer e-mail in under twenty-four hours, there is one case where you should wait at least twenty-four hours before responding: when you're angry, offended or argumentative. E-mail written when you're in these moods tends to exacerbate problems, so delay your response."
The reason this advice keeps recurring is because it's good advice.
Here's part of Jason Fried's description of the problem:
Can you believe that language? “37signals has not yet committed to open conversations about its products or services.” WHAT?! We haven’t committed to open conversations about our products or services because we haven’t signed Get Satisfaction’s pact on Get Satisfaction’s site which generates Get Satisfaction’s income? That’s awfully close to blackmail (or a shakedown or a mafioso protection scheme).
It doesn't matter whether Get Satisfaction wrote the false and insulting phrase about "open conversations" by accident or on purpose. It was insulting, and false, and if Jason's response came off as a bit angry nobody should be the least bit surprised. They asked for it; they got it.
It also doesn't matter whether Get Satisfaction was committing a shakedown through "ignorance" or out of "malice". A shakedown is a shakedown. Get Satisfaction created a problem [1], and then asked for something of value to make the problem go away [2]. That's a shakedown.
I'm perfectly willing to believe that Get Satisfaction didn't mean to wake up one day and discover themselves in a dubiously ethical line of work. [3] But they did. To their credit, they seem to be reacting with appropriate public displays of horror and remorse.
---
[1] The problem: A site that fooled me, and apparently more than a handful of other people, into thinking it was an official 37signals support site. One that was full of questions, but no answers.
[2] The value: A public endorsement from 37signals, in the form of a publicly visible signature on a "Company-Customer pact". Endorsements are valuable. (The pact itself seems to be a bunch of legally meaningless pledges, but then again I'm not a lawyer; if it contains any legally actionable language, then the mere act of signing it is a cost.)
Also: A public notice, on the Get Satisfaction page, that 37signals employees visit that page -- a notice which, once it is up, will tend to obligate 37signals to devote valuable employee time to answering questions on a third-party support system that's incompatible with their standard support system. The cost of having to do tech support on two -- or three, or four, or seventeen -- different public sites is nontrivial. (Copying and pasting support tickets from site to site is inefficient. Hacking up RSS feeds to integrate trouble reports from n different sites is inefficient. Answering the FAQs 2n times per week, rather than just n times per week, is inefficient.) More importantly, splitting your support effort across multiple venues dilutes your brand, dilutes your customer base, and confuses your customers ("where should I report this problem, again"?), and that's even more costly.
[3] I've had the experience of suddenly realizing that I'm working on an unethical project. It's not uncommon -- just ask the people who've been working on Wall Street. It's amazing how such things can sneak up on you.
Anyway, that's not the point.
The concept of "fair use" applies to copyright law, but it doesn't apply to trademark law at all. And if GetSatisfaction doesn't have anyone on staff who knows the difference between copyright law and trademark law, while they are copying business corporation trademarks to display on their site, they are acting in a seriously unprofessional and legally dangerous manner. The lesson for employees of GetSatisfaction would be to not accept stock options as compensation, and to start sending around resumes to a company that is more legally prudent in its business model.
* ... for purposes of education, criticism, or comment ...
* ... noncommercially ...
* ... and only by ensuring you don't dilute the mark by causing confusion about whether the owner approved it.
It is not at all clear that 37s couldn't lawyer up on GetSatisfaction, even after yesterday's cleanup. Of course, 37s probably won't do that.
This whole thing leads me to believe that GS operates a little on the shady side. Everything from the poorly worded "box" to the competitor's ads to the clipped logos and trademarks seems designed to stick it to the companies in question in a manner that is borderline extortion.
It seems that instead of seeing companies as clients and selling them a service they can use, they're operating a giant defamation board where anything goes, and perpetrating the "us against them" mentality that seems popular these days with consumers.
Bad karma begets bad karma, and the whole business case of GS seems to be designed to generate bad karma. Once GS gets big enough to rankle a company with big enough legal pockets, it's going to go the way of the dodo.
You were angry, and honestly I don’t blame you. We all know what it’s like to feel manipulated. And while I would have preferred you sending us a note, or even posting it somewhere less trafficked than your popular blog, the fact is that Get Satisfaction is a huge proponent of public airing of grievances. You were right to bring it to our attention any way you saw fit. I only wish that you hadn’t implied inethical motives with words like “extortion,” “mafia shakedown,” etc. The fact is, many people hear those words and nothing else, and it compromises years of work by our small but committed team.
"Inethical"? That's not even a word!
Edit: I see that this style is in place, which should work:
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