[Cialug] OT: Google

[Nathan Stien]

On 2/14/07, Aaron Korver <aaron.korver at gmail.com> wrote:
> And isn't that really a shame?  Think if people would be more willing to
> simply say "This is what we are going to do, and we acknowledge we won't
> make everyone happy, so deal with it".  I could rant for a long time about
> this quirk of our current society.

While I share your distaste for political correctness, I'm afraid I
must respectfully disagree with the idea that we'd be better off if
companies didn't have to care about what we wanted.

I very much want companies to be accountable to the public.  Companies
who are truly accountable to an informed public are serving both our
best interests and their own.  Companies *should* worry about what
consumers want.  They *should* realize we hate DRM and other
anti-consumer tactics.  And they do, in effect, say "This is what we
are going to do, and we acknowledge we don't make everyone happy, so
deal with it".  They wrap it in cozier marketing-speak, but they don't
have to care if you're happy as long as you pay them.

The really scary companies are often the ones who are least
accountable, generally because they're propped up by natural or
government-granted monopolies, subsidies, and/or special tax breaks.
Companies in such positions have very little incentive to do right by
you -- they have lobbyists to get them special favors.  Tiny little
You can just lump it, because with a monopoly, you can't even vote it
down with your dollars.

E.g., only one cable company in town, and they suck?  You're mostly
just out of luck, because they don't have much incentive to please
you.  (Tangent: I use Mediacom, but I'm glad DirectTV exists just so
that Mediacom has an incentive to provide a better service.  I've
lived in one-horse towns before.)

Microsoft knows their customers would hate most of the breakage
they've put in Vista if people knew about it, but they can count on
their mindshare-monopoly.  Most people don't realize there's any
viable alternative OS, and MS can use this fact to sell them snake
oil.  If MS really worried about what would make people happy, their
products would just not suck so very hard.  (See, this *is* kind of
Linux related after all...)

Matthew Nuzum's Google political correctness scenario definitely sucks
from the point of view of us engineers/techs/geeks, but from the point
of view of a company out to make some money, it is clearly good to be
sensitive to what your customers desire/demand.  And often, your
customers demand some level of political correctness.

As I said, I am personally nauseated by intense political correctness.
 I am an engineer, and like so many of my low-tact peers, I like to
call a spade a spade.  However, it just makes good sense that a
business should avoid alienating customers if possible.  If the
demands of the public shift way from political correctness, then savvy
businesses will follow that trend and will thereby prosper.

- Nathan

-- 
"Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying
to find easier ways to do something." - Robert A. Heinlein