As the Toyota mess continues to snowball, it’s clear at least a few people got sloppy there and that has led to the recall of nearly ten million vehicles. On the other side of the globe, internet powerhouse Google also got called out for making a big mistake with the launch of its new social networking site Buzz, as an explicit effort to compete with Twitter and Facebook. But Google’s mistake was very different.
With Twitter and Facebook, people have to explicitly reach out to “follow” or “friend” a person in Twitter and Facebook, respectively. And with varying degrees, once you are a friend or a follower on those sites, you can see who else has been “approved” by the user as a friend or a follower. Google decided to skip that step for Buzz users, in part because they “could” in the sense that Buzz is connected to a person’s G-mail account and the G-mail account has the names and e-mail addresses of all of the people you contact on G-mail. So G-mail decided that for everyone who opted into Buzz, they would automatically connect users in the friend/follow sense with their most frequently contacted G-mail contacts. In a certain sense they did it because they could, the technology was there. It harkens back to the old British explorer George Mallory who was one of the first people to try to climb Mount Everest, and when asked why he was doing it, he replied “because it’s there.”
This happens to be a vivid example of a spectacularly bad decision to use technology “because it’s there.”
In Rethink I talk at length about the importance of being in touch with what your customer values, and what they don’t value, and in 2010, irrespective of customer segment by age, socioeconomic grouping, height, hair color, you name it – privacy is one of the top two or three things you cannot mess with. Somehow Google overlooked this one and apparently inferred that users would like this feature, but the gigantic uproar last week proved otherwise.
They seem to think that now that they have fixed this problem, they are asking the tens of millions of people who opted in to the Buzz service to opt in again. I did last week, but I am not going back anytime soon. It will be a case study for the ages watching whether the Google brand is going to trump the mistake, or if the mistake will be like Odwalla’s E. coli mess in the mid-90s where they lost the trust of their customer and it took more than a decade to rebuild that trust.
I am going to tweet this post now . . .
-Ric
P.S. I do have to wonder if George Mallory’s nickname was G-mall.
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