The other day I was trying to figure out a problem I was having with Google’s awesome Gmail, and whether to let Google know about their problem, when I remembered that Google thinks I (and Flock) hate them.
I actually own a Google shirt and enjoy wearing it. I admire the people of Google.
While at Flock I had the tedious, but very important task of reading (and responding) to all of the emails sent to feedback@flock.com — this was one more task in my 14 hr+ day and there was a lot of spam both automated and hand written, but I digress.
Sometime in the first few months of 2006, a friend told me that the following was on their internal forums:
Change the default search to Google.
With the response from Lloyd Budd of Flock:
It takes two clicks to change… your loss.
Dang, I thought, I must have been in a really bad mood to have written such an inappropriate response. So at the time, using gmail ironically, I quickly found the discussion. Dec. 4, 2005 the feedback read:
Change the default search to Google.
Why on Earth is it Yahoo!? I’m not going to use Flock based on this alone for now.
Now, my response is still poor, but it makes a little more sense in that I was responding to a hostile email. I definitely should not have responded if I wasn’t able to respond politely.
I’m not going to share who that feedback was from, but I did email them letting them know that it hurt hearing that they had misrepresented the conversation.
Its good to know that if you ever write or say anything about Google it may end up on their internal forums, maybe not the way you said it. It’s highly searchable.
8 Comments
I know I’m a naturally obnoxious person, but I agree with what you said and probably would have written something very similar if I were in your position. It’s really easy to change your default search engine and you can’t please all of the people all of the time. My preferred browser, SeaMonkey, defaulted to Ask Jeeves when I installed it, but it was no big deal. I just changed it to Google. No problem.
So someone sent a fairly incendiary feedback email to Flock, received a reply, and then forwarded it to their friend at Google?
Hahaha, I found this pretty funny. Have you tried to send them feedback, and got nasty replies?
Google is not bad because “Hey”, it is at the top. After what I read, right now I am really interested in what the person replied to you, if he did.
No, the person never responded.
I thik Google’s giving me a tough time, specially when I got my PR5 down to PR0.
Very funny, but I like them coz they send a lot of traffic to my blogs!
Mean, am I!
One should not take such big companies personally. All they try to do is maximize visitor amount, and of course benefits, at the same time minimizing work involved. I haven’t found this truth until I started to work for one of such companies. Their consultancy email account was receiving thousands of messages a day that were responded automatically then archived and eventually deleted. Google doesn’t hate people, it’s just too big to be personal.