I received the following email last night, and it still has my fur standing-on-end (defensive rage).

Subject: Google AdSense ad serving has been disabled to your site

This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does not
accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hello,

During a recent review of your account we found that you are currently
displaying Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our program
policies
(https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=48182&stc=aspe-1pp-en).

--------------------------------------------------
EXAMPLE PAGE: http://foolswisdom.com/

Please note that this URL is an example and that the same violations may
exist on other pages of this website or other sites in your network.

VIOLATION(S) FOUND:

It is important for a site displaying AdSense to offer significant value
to the user by providing unique and relevant content, and not to place ads
on auto-generated pages or pages with little to no original content.

Your site should also provide a good user experience through clear
navigation and organization. Users should be able to easily click through
your pages and find the information they are seeking.

Please review Google's Webmaster Quality Guidelines (
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66361 ) for
more information.

ACTION TAKEN: We have disabled ad serving to your site.

ACCOUNT STATUS: ACTIVE
Your AdSense account remains active. However, please note that our team
reserves the right to disable your account at any time. As such, we
encourage you to become familiar with our program policies and monitor
your network accordingly.

Issue ID# 3227412

--------------------------------------------------
Thank you for your cooperation.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team
----------------
For more information regarding this email, please visit our Help Center:
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=113058&stc=aspe-ai4-en.

Emphasis was mine.

The only pieces of useful information would seem to be “EXAMPLE PAGE: http://foolswisdom.com/“. The reason is provided as an exercise for the reader to solve, and the status of disabled, but active almost makes the whole thing humorous. The email also has the feel of treating good customer’s like criminals, because of how “bad” customers behave.

So what do I do with this information? “Please do not reply to this message.” That’s the real problem, not my AdSense account. I’ve received an anxiety causing email, and I’m helpless.

Don Dodge, then at Microsoft, now at Google(!), wrote October 27, 2007 what still resonates with me today “Will Google Docs and Spreadsheets succeed in the enterprise? I don’t think Google will succeed in the enterprise. Why? Customer Support.”

“Google doesn’t understand people,” [Don Norman] said. “Have you ever spoken to a Google support person on the phone? They don’t have them. Sure, they’ll direct you to their blogs — where you’ll be lucky if you can find the answer you’re looking for — or they’ll let you give feedback. But do they ever give you feedback on your feedback?”
FROM “DON NORMAN: GOOGLE DOESN’T GET PEOPLE, IT SELLS THEM” BY BOBBIE JOHNSON ON GIGAOM.COM, SEPT 5, 2011

I think they do understand people, and have a stubborn resolve to demonstrate that machines can be programmed to help man better than man can help herself.

They’ll tell you it’s a scalability problem:

If you have a billion users, and a mere 0.1% of them have an issue that requires support on a given day (an average of one support issue per person every three years), and each issue takes 10 minutes on average for a human to personally resolve, then you’d spend19 person-years handling support issues every day.

If each support person works an eight-hour shift each day then you’d need 20,833 support people on permanent staff just to keep up.

That, folks, is internet scale.

That is cold, machine cold, comfort.

Customer support isn’t the 1 in a 1000, 10 minute on average problem, customer support is the support you receive under exceptional circumstances. This is when you need support, and when most companies fail to deliver.

So what do you do when you need support from Google? Either you know a Matt Cutts (there is only one!), or you hope your friends, like Chris Messina, working on Google+ and other promising tools with warmth, will help Google find balance and treat their customers, like you know, people.

Oh, and if there is anyone on the Google AdSense team reading this, I suspect that there is a bug in your “review of your account” software, as you probably should have terminated CloudFlare’s account, not mine.

I whole heartily recommend you try the open source flavor of Movable Type. It is clearly a great product created by fantastic people.

If you are thinking you only have time to try one other blogging software than WordPress, my time and money is on Drupal. People bringing Drupal into the conversation as an alternative has been one of my favorite parts of the discussions. Built on the same PHP stack that powers WordPress and much of the rest of the high performance web. Drupal is the full featured CMS with the heart and minds of the open source communities (I hang out with). Its blogging experience isn’t as polished out of the box as WP or MT, but it’s getting there — and we’re working hard at staying focused and one step ahead of them

If you have time please do share what you love about these other personal publishing environment, particularly if it relates to something that annoys you about WordPress. This way WordPress participants can respond by letting our code do the talking.

If you are currently using WordPress then your highest priority will likely be to plan to take a look at WordPress 2.5 as a release candidate will be coming very soon — watch the WordPress Development blog for the news.

I’m disappointed by Anil’s “upgrade guide”, but not surprised. I used to greatly respect Anil Dash, but in the last year I’ve grown to mostly only respect his abilities. He speaks of sincerity, but I don’t see any other way to interpret the following comments, and other parts of his argument, other than being patronizing and insincere:

I should think that the WP community would be more frustrated with Automattic not having the 2.5 release ready (or even a release date) than with someone pointing out that there are good options for bloggers.

And from the same comment:

And honestly, it may well be that Matt isn’t used to the way that competition works when you’re a well-funded company with tens of millions of dollars in the bank. I know it took us a while to adjust to the reality of how perceptions change in that situation. But given that Automattic’s raised many millions more dollars than Six Apart, I certainly don’t think it’s unfair for us as an underdog to point out our strengths.

The least Anil could do was give us some time to spend some of the money before playing the underdog card.

He is also very passionate in the “upgrade guide” about doing everything first. I’m not really interested, nor do I think most people are, in who did what first. When I get focused on firsts, my friends generously either help escape my nostalgia or my indulgent in the latest fad. I’m reminded to refocus on substance, on how the details come together to create the experience, and what real problems we need to solve together.

Solving problems together is the spirt of open source. I explicitly pointed out that Anil’s post is on the .com blog, because although Six Apart has improved its open source message since I wrote ”

Movable Type 200% Open Source!” Six Apart can be an even greater open source ambassador. As I wrote in the discussion around the 200% article, the lack of open source messaging on movabletype.com is one of the things as an open source evangalist I find disheartening. Looking today I could only find a mention of the Movable Type open source flavor [sic] on movabletype.com down in the Pricing FAQ. I find it awkward then that Anil’s “upgrade guide” talks heavily about open source technologies.

I’m a little upset at Michael Sippey’s response “we’re here to compete” in support of Anil’s “upgrade guide”. I had hoped that Anil had made the mistake of writing such an article on his own. In responded to one part of his article I wrote there:

If you think WordPress is “provided by Automattic”, you don’t understand WordPress and how we and most other open source products operate. WordPress is nothing without the participation of the community.

All those other flavors of Movable Type aren’t open source. As I’ve been discussing with Darren Hoyt regarding Expression Engine:

A popular open source platform ensures maintainability (or transition to another popular open platform) and no vendor lock. Sure, it can be good for your own business to use tools that require specialized knowledge and much fewer people have expertise in but even then having to maintain it may affect your sanity later

Boris Mann, champion of Drupal, and VP of Product Development at Raincity Studios says it even more poignantly:

The “enemy” here is proprietary systems (and those really are quotes around enemy, as I recall having a great discussion with a proprietary Java based system developer this morning at CCI2008). They are not good for business, they are not
good for communities, and they are not good for the growth of this
interlinked web of data that is becoming truly useful.

As Matt wrote in “WordPress is Open Source“, “Movable Type has 8 different licenses and the [open source] one doesn’t allow any support.”

Matt wrote “WordPress is Open Source” partially in response to Movable Type product manager and lead developer Byrne Reese’s comment:

@Sunnduwn – I think that is a question better asked of Automattic. Anil, and certainly not Six Apart, has never been briefed, nor has anyone for that matter been presented with an accounting of what is open and closed source at Automattic.

Byrne you or anyone else just have to ask. Actually, I remember you have asked related questions and I answered you as best as could there.

What we produce that isn’t open source relates to some of the work I’ve quietly (out of the public eye, anyway) long been doing with our hosted solutions. I’m always asking, what isn’t open source and why isn’t it?

Please continue to challenge us here, and challenge us more. Sometimes we won’t answer you as quick as you like or provide the source code as quick as you like, but where we hesitate it is most often to make sure that you don’t have to trudge through some quick hacks, but instead get to benefit from what we learn from them. As Matt says “there is more GPL stuff on the way, as well. ”

I do love the passion of the conversations that are taking place! But please don’t take my, Anil, Michael, or Matt’s passionate words on what is a better solution, we are all incredible biased — I don’t trust myself when it comes to talking about WordPress or the competition.

I remember reading the title of Don Dodge’s post “Vista more secure than Linux, Apple OSX, and Windows XP” and thinking “this ought to be rich”. I did have my problems with the article, and shared my thoughts on it (reading it now, I was a little too intense in my arguments — see what I mean about passion), but I came away really respecting Jeff Jones, Director of Trustworthy Computing at Microsoft [sic].

Here is how Jeff ends his post “Exactly how biased am I?”

Am I biased? I do not think so, but let’s just all keep assuming I am, because I don’t mind. If I make comparisons, I’ll lay out my metrics. I’ll lay out my assumptions. I’ll describe the methodology. Then, if you want to dispute the results, debate the assumptions, or critique the methodology, I’ll ask the same of you. Regardless of the outcome, all sides will get presented, progress is made and that’s a win for interested readers.

That is where Anil’s article fails. His post is one sound bite after another without at least the minimum of links to the technical details. I also got a kick out of how he is motoring along with his “comparision” [sic] with WordPress, and then switches into “A Dashboard That Measures Success”, “Design Matters”, “Get Support Right From The Source”, which I’m not sure are ways MT differentiates itself positively or maybe at all — anyway, his case there is even less clear than the rest of the article.

Jay Allen also wrote “Nothing was said that was untrue about Movable Type or WordPress and, aside from the cheeky title, the post spoke much more to me about the pride and excitement the team has in their new version which they wanted to communicate to the world.”

If the article was about his team’s pride and excitement that would be awesome, but a large part is actually comparisons without context or substance.

But maybe I’m wrong. Or maybe Shelley Powers’ is correct and “Anil’s post was rather funny, and tongue in cheek”. Or just maybe, Anil read and misunderstand “Overcoming Bias: My Favorite Liar”

I’m really glad for Anil’s “upgrade guide”, because it presents to our face some of the Six Apart FUD that potential customers come to us with when considering either WordPress.com VIP hosting or the Automattic Support Network. As I said, it’s a great launching point for more conversations.

Competition is awesome. Most important is having different open source solutions with focus on different problems, or different solutions to the same problems.

It doesn’t really matter what I think. You all know where all our heart and mind lies. I’m most interested in hearing from people still living in a neutral nation, digging in and getting diry with the design decisions and technical details of the real challenges you need to solve, and how well the WordPress experience treats you in response.

Don Dodge on Why Companies Fail in Hindsight 2.0, Lessons from a Failed Web 2.0 startup about the online calendar service Kiko being sold on ebay ($50,000):

Web 2.0 companies, or any company for that matter, do not fail because of high expectations. They fail because they run out of money. They run out of money because they don’t have a viable business model.

We are talking real businesses correct? Lets take the model out of business.

So what is your business? Do you have one or more professionals figuring this out? Tara Hunt, though I love her, does not count because a business probably can’t be described in a single prose blog post.

It is definitely rude to casually ask other people what their business is.

The term “business model” has bothered me [, Peter Rip,] for a long time. I have always found it to be a glib method of characterizing a company’s relationship with its various constituencies, e.g., customers, suppliers, competitors, etc. The problem isn’t really the concept. The problem is that it’s a complex, multidimensional structure that doesn’t really lend itself to a summary sentence, at least not if you really want to understand the business.

Peter Rip, EarlyStageVC, Business Model, Schmizness Model