Man vs. Machine

Ignoring the Hue and Cry: If social media’s taught us anything, it’s that consumers have a voice. This is mostly good, only sometimes it isn’t. It seems like companies aren’t willing to stick to their guns and make the tough decisions that innovation requires. Henry Ford famously said that if he listened to what his customers wanted, he’d have given them faster horses. In tech, there are ample cases of trailblazers making what at the time are unpopular decisions that pay off in the long run. See Facebook’s introduction of the News Feed and Apple’s decision not to include floppy disks in its computers. Big Champagne’s Eric Garland thinks the same will be true of Netflix’s decision to hike the price for some of its customers in a bid to move them over to streaming: “To be blunt, make no mistake this announcement signifies Reed Hastings’ intent to kill the DVD. For sure, the DVD doesn’t need Reed Hastings to kill it. It’s dying anyway. He’s just helping it along on its preordained course.” Fortune favors the bold.

Privacy is Alive and Well: Maybe Google execs read their Sun Tzu. It is clearly attacking Facebook where it’s most vulnerable: it’s sometimes dismissive approach to privacy. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has a complicated view of personal privacy. It pretty much boils down to: people don’t have it and should get over it and should instead concentrate on being good people. That’s a pretty expansive point of view. But as Nick Bilton notes on the NYT’s Bits blog, Google+ is looking to turn that notion on its head with elegant sharing controls. In fact, he calls privacy its “No. 1 feature.” If that’s the case — I haven’t used it long enough to know yet — that will truly put to test Zuckerberg’s belief that people don’t really care that much about privacy because they join social networks for the express reason they want to share stuff with others.