Comments on: Craigslist and the customer service-led business http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2009/09/01/craigslist-and-the-customer-service-led-business/ EthanZ's musings on Africa, media and international development Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:45:31 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Gary Wolf http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2009/09/01/craigslist-and-the-customer-service-led-business/comment-page-1/#comment-1723303 Gary Wolf Wed, 02 Sep 2009 04:06:17 +0000 http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2009/09/01/craigslist-and-the-customer-service-led-business/#comment-1723303 Ethan - thank you for your generous reflections on this story. I think you are right about the rarity of customer driven businesses. Something I didn't write about in the main piece, but that you will probably appreciate, is what it means for programmers to be "driven." What people ask them to do, with a tone of confidence and entitlement, is often more difficult than it seems; maybe it is even impossible to do without unleashing consequences that haven't been considered by the person asking. As you say, usually this person is an executive of some type. They may be highly skilled; they may even be right in what they are asking; still, a programmer's first response may well be a kind of skeptical silence, neither a yes nor a no, along with a posture that conveys an uncertainty about whether, if the request is judiciously ignored, it will go away. In haunting the craigslist user forums, and watching the stream of demands and complaints and requests go unanswered, I had to laugh sometimes. Sure, most of them probably should go unanswered. But it was like the craigslist engineers had traded the annoying managers of a standard company for _thousands_ of annoying managers... Ethan – thank you for your generous reflections on this story. I think you are right about the rarity of customer driven businesses. Something I didn’t write about in the main piece, but that you will probably appreciate, is what it means for programmers to be “driven.” What people ask them to do, with a tone of confidence and entitlement, is often more difficult than it seems; maybe it is even impossible to do without unleashing consequences that haven’t been considered by the person asking. As you say, usually this person is an executive of some type. They may be highly skilled; they may even be right in what they are asking; still, a programmer’s first response may well be a kind of skeptical silence, neither a yes nor a no, along with a posture that conveys an uncertainty about whether, if the request is judiciously ignored, it will go away. In haunting the craigslist user forums, and watching the stream of demands and complaints and requests go unanswered, I had to laugh sometimes. Sure, most of them probably should go unanswered. But it was like the craigslist engineers had traded the annoying managers of a standard company for _thousands_ of annoying managers…

]]> By: Kevin Donovan http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2009/09/01/craigslist-and-the-customer-service-led-business/comment-page-1/#comment-1722810 Kevin Donovan Tue, 01 Sep 2009 22:36:31 +0000 http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2009/09/01/craigslist-and-the-customer-service-led-business/#comment-1722810 This idea of producing what people ask for, not what the company experts think is appropriate (the Apple model?) is a great one to consider w/r/t development agencies. Instead of pushing money and projects out the door, the major donors would do well to ask average citizens in the developing world what they want and need. That would be a good use of ICT *for* development. This idea of producing what people ask for, not what the company experts think is appropriate (the Apple model?) is a great one to consider w/r/t development agencies.

Instead of pushing money and projects out the door, the major donors would do well to ask average citizens in the developing world what they want and need. That would be a good use of ICT *for* development.

]]>