It never ceases to amaze me how quickly an a decision can be made without thinking it all the way through… For example… It’s not all that uncommon for me to do something for a client (against my advice), and then have that client realize a day later that they hadn’t listened to what I said was going to be a problem, and sure enough, now need it undone. People lose focus on who they are trying to serve to quickly, and very quickly begin serving themselves.
Case in point:Â Creative.
If you haven’t heard the story… Creative came down hard on one of it’s forum members for distributing drivers he created/modified to improve the usability of Creative’s sound cards in Vista. Basically, he figured out a way to re-enable all the features that were available in XP that were not yet available in the Vista drivers… And to put it a little more in perspective… Creative has done next to nothing to get these features back into Vista (Their vista driver has been crap for well over a year now). In any case… When they came down on the guy, and he was forced to pull the driver, the backlash from the community was huge.
In less than 3 days, the news about what Creative had done hit Slashdot, Engadget, Fark, and a dozen other technology blogs. Their forums now have almost 1000 messages telling Creative how “dissappointed” they are in Creative’s decision. Talk about negative press…. In fact, now the people are starting to organize to sue Creative for false advertising the features available in Vista.
Creative has already started the spin control by posting a forum message saying they plan on reversing their decision.. However, it’s to late… With a full weekend of minimal action, they’ve done enough damage to their name with one stupid decision, that there going to have to do something more than just “reversing” the decision to make this right with their customers.
In any case, if your ever in business, always try to remember that the customers really do come first… Maybe not singular, but if you have 1000’s of customers with the same problem, it really is in your best interest to not do something that hurts all of them, and would be much better to help them instead.