I usually stick to that in day affairs. But for people who are essentially in the business of thinking my intuition and judgment is usually that ignorance is almost as bad as malice.
Another way of seeing it is that if you make ignorance "totally OK now", you just make it way too easy for actual malice to get away with more.
Grown-up people, and certainly companies, should be held responsible for their actions regardless of their motive or lack of it, so that they act responsibly towards themselves and others.
But for people who are essentially in the business of thinking my intuition and judgment is usually that ignorance is almost as bad as malice.
In many legal settings, saying "Oops, I was ignorant," or (today) "April Fools" wouldn't be a defense against various forms of liability. The leaders of a business corporation have to make sure that their employees (their agents, by common law) aren't doing illegal acts.
"The one book we encourage startup founders to read is Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. It's critically important for anyone in business."
If you read that (or listen to it as an audio book, as I did) you get that one of the central points is: don't put people on the defensive.
Guy Kawasaki in Art of the Start has a paragraph labeled "Wait When You Hate":
"Although you should always answer e-mail in under twenty-four hours, there is one case where you should wait at least twenty-four hours before responding: when you're angry, offended or argumentative. E-mail written when you're in these moods tends to exacerbate problems, so delay your response."
The reason this advice keeps recurring is because it's good advice.
While I agree with the principle "never attribute to malice that which can be explained by ignorance", I think a discussion of how a certain action caused damage, and how to remedy that damage, can be easily sidetracked by a discussion of whether the action was malicious or ignorant.
Here's part of Jason Fried's description of the problem:
Can you believe that language? “37signals has not yet committed to open conversations about its products or services.” WHAT?! We haven’t committed to open conversations about our products or services because we haven’t signed Get Satisfaction’s pact on Get Satisfaction’s site which generates Get Satisfaction’s income? That’s awfully close to blackmail (or a shakedown or a mafioso protection scheme).
It doesn't matter whether Get Satisfaction wrote the false and insulting phrase about "open conversations" by accident or on purpose. It was insulting, and false, and if Jason's response came off as a bit angry nobody should be the least bit surprised. They asked for it; they got it.
It also doesn't matter whether Get Satisfaction was committing a shakedown through "ignorance" or out of "malice". A shakedown is a shakedown. Get Satisfaction created a problem [1], and then asked for something of value to make the problem go away [2]. That's a shakedown.
I'm perfectly willing to believe that Get Satisfaction didn't mean to wake up one day and discover themselves in a dubiously ethical line of work. [3] But they did. To their credit, they seem to be reacting with appropriate public displays of horror and remorse.
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[1] The problem: A site that fooled me, and apparently more than a handful of other people, into thinking it was an official 37signals support site. One that was full of questions, but no answers.
[2] The value: A public endorsement from 37signals, in the form of a publicly visible signature on a "Company-Customer pact". Endorsements are valuable. (The pact itself seems to be a bunch of legally meaningless pledges, but then again I'm not a lawyer; if it contains any legally actionable language, then the mere act of signing it is a cost.)
Also: A public notice, on the Get Satisfaction page, that 37signals employees visit that page -- a notice which, once it is up, will tend to obligate 37signals to devote valuable employee time to answering questions on a third-party support system that's incompatible with their standard support system.
The cost of having to do tech support on two -- or three, or four, or seventeen -- different public sites is nontrivial. (Copying and pasting support tickets from site to site is inefficient. Hacking up RSS feeds to integrate trouble reports from n different sites is inefficient. Answering the FAQs 2n times per week, rather than just n times per week, is inefficient.) More importantly, splitting your support effort across multiple venues dilutes your brand, dilutes your customer base, and confuses your customers ("where should I report this problem, again"?), and that's even more costly.
[3] I've had the experience of suddenly realizing that I'm working on an unethical project. It's not uncommon -- just ask the people who've been working on Wall Street. It's amazing how such things can sneak up on you.
Please. Grabbing someone's logo and making them pay you not to write "[company] has not committed to open conversation about its products and services. Encourage them to join and support the Company-Customer pact" on a very official looking page with your logo on it?
I'm sorry, but them's fighting words.
At a cursory glance, it isn't entirely obvious that Get Satisfaction is unofficial. Further, particularly for new companies, Get Satisfaction might end up with better PR than the official support forums! While there is value for the consumer in having off site forums that a company can't control, compare this to reseller ratings. On the latter, there is no chance you'll think you're on an official company page. Get Satisfaction seems to me to go to lengths to give that impression.
Glance more carefully. It is now entirely obvious that Get Satisfaction is unofficial. Check out their page for 37signals: http://getsatisfaction.com/37signals
- The title is "Unofficial customer service & support for 37signals on Get Satisfaction".
- The wording has been changed from "37signals has not commited to open conversation..." to "No one from 37signals has sponsored, endorsed or joined the conversation on Get Satisfaction yet. Employees may sign up here."
- The top of the page has large text that reads "Unofficial Customer Support Community for 37signals"
So Get Satisfaction deserves some credit for changing its ways.
The large "Unofficial" was only added after word got out.
The previous title was "Customer Support Community for 37signals" with the 37signals logo next to it.
They deserve a little credit for changing it so quickly, but I see no reason why I should feel sorry for them now.
Alright. It's probably a difference of opinion, nothing more. I'm quite forgiving by nature (for better or for worse), so I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt -- if they say they truly didn't mean to cause any damage, then I believe them. So to me, the fact that they changed the wording so quickly (less than 24 hours!) is a very positive thing, and is similar to any other company responding quickly to community feedback about a design flaw. Regardless of anything else, it is at least good for companies to react so quickly.
Who, exactly, is asking you to feel sorry for Get Satisfaction?
They clearly apologized, said how they would do things differently in response, and then did those things. I'm not sure what more you can expect of human beings.
There may be other aspects to their business model that remain questionable, so yes, take them to task for those (apparently they left the fee for taking competitors adds off the page in place, for example). But I do not think talking about how their actions make you feel is especially productive.
"Who, exactly, is asking you to feel sorry for Get Satisfaction?"
At the risk of answering for someone else...At this point, I would summarize most of the criticisms of Fried and defenses of GS as "The good, kind people of GS are being bullied by 37Signals." So, those people.
Having an employee tasked with monitoring that site is probably a bigger deal than paying, especially for 37s, which runs a really lean, carefully-designed team.
Yes, as the two astute replies beforehand have pointed out, you have to have someone on your payroll provide content for someone else's site. Nice work if that other site can get it.
Makes some good points about what would have been a better way to handle this, including this particularly important truism:
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by ignorance.