I not only appreciate what they are trying to do moving forward, but also the entirely good natured, reasonable tone of the whole message. He explains without getting defensive and, in my opinion, helps Yahoo come out of this with a potential PR win. Well done.
After reading the first sentence of the post, I paused and tried to imagine what would come next. I had three guesses:
1) A clean, unconditional apology, like: "I screwed up, I'm going to fix it". I had very little hope since people don't often admit this type of things.
2) A defensive apology (that is, not really an apology): "Yeah I kinda screwed up a tiny little bit, but really it wasn't my fault, the predecessors..."
3) A smart-ass offensive strategy: "aha, you don't get it, our t-shirts are really cool, you should be happy that we even offer gifts and recognitions, you ungrateful bastards"
My ideal answer would have been 1) of course. Turns out, he exceeded my expectations (I'm the cynical jerk, here). He was a good guy in the story, explained the situation without fake apologies, or anything. Great answer.
Word count for "sorry" or "apologize" in that article: 0.
That is PR jiu-jitsu. Make everyone feel good, make yourself look good and don't even use the word "sorry". Of course, it helps that you were "in the right" to begin with, but deftly handled, nevertheless...
Hm. Now that I think about it, both of those words are actually really bad for being used in a sincere apology. The salient points of an apology are (1) "I own this action, and this action was wrong and I understand why" and (2) "These are my actions in response and in recompense".
Neither of those call for saying, "I'm sorry" or "I apologize" and saying either seems to detract a bit. I could be wrong? It's interesting to think about.
This is one of those situations where, since you're responding to a question, the "This." format of answer makes your comment unclear. Just FYI - it sounds like you're listing the things he should be apologizing for (although that's not the case given context, obviously).
Agreed on exceeding expectations! I wasn't self-aware enough to parse my expectations the way you have, but I was very cynical when I clicked through and very pleasantly surprised.
He has a well balanced head on his shoulders.
He should be in PR !
It's striking when you can tell whether an answer is honest/no-nonsense. And not even an overdone apology can beat an honest-to-goodness straight forward answer.
And then yesterday morning “t-shirt-gate” hit. My inbox was full of angry email from people inside and out of Yahoo. How dare I send just a t-shirt to people as a thanks?
Guy tries to do something nice and gets a big slap on the face. I can imagine this reaction from those outside of Yahoo wanting big rewards for their discoveries, sad to hear it was coming from internal as well.
Agreed, this is an excellent apology. No "sorry if you were upset" conditional apologies here, just a straight up "here is where we dropped the ball, and here is what we have fixed so it doesn't happen again; we're sorry".
Agreed; hopefully the people who got upset will get some clarity from this and everyone will come out ahead.
Personally, I think it's ridiculous that this was blown so far out of proportion, all because someone went above and beyond with his own resources trying to thank reporters. But then I don't have both sides of the story and, frankly, I'm not going to go looking for internet anger to figure it out.
If you say "what they are trying to do", we understand that this process will take place as time progresses. It's implied in the verb tense, that's why verb tenses exist. So "moving forward" never adds any meaning when used in its current corporate-speak fashion. Hackers should respect language.
I appreciate the tip, but you don't need to justify yourself with "hackers should respect language." Especially as that might imply that you think I don't, before giving me the opportunity to acknowledge the note. Thanks for the copy check :)
