I can save you some reading and get straight to my point: we fear conspiracies when what we should fear is human error.
Now that the fiasco with Amazon is fading from our top-of-mind awareness, it strikes me that there are a few things to be learned from it. Some for us; some for Amazon.
For us, I think the main one is: Something isn’t true just because you want it to be. And with an issue such as the one that occurred, you don’t rely on what a “Members Services representative” says because they are likely as much in the dark as you are. You head up the chain and get an official response.
For Amazon, when you don’t know, say so. Calling a balls-up like the vanishing of gay-lesbian titles from their lists and rankings a “glitch” merely adds fuel to the fire. The correct response is, “We are as alarmed as our customers. Currently, we don’t know what happened. It appears to be a technical issue. We’re working around the clock to identify what the problem is and where it lies and are dedicated to fixing it as soon as possible. We’ll be keeping our customers informed of our progress along the way and apologize to them and to those authors whose works have been affected.”
Or something like that. Better still would to have been really blunt and state that Amazon is a business and would not deliberately risk sales and the possibility of bad publicity that could affect their revenue.
The other lesson for Amazon, I think, is to accept that you can’t be all things to all people. You have to make some choices. Tweaking algorithms and tags and so on to keep everyone happy is risky because it makes something complex even more so.
It should also be a reminder to everyone that our reliance on technology is a precarious one. Think of all the pages of code in all the world’s systems and how many characters those pages include, the asterisks, backslashes, forward slashes and words and rules and consider how easily one character could be wrong, one input mis-typed or mis-entered, and how that smallest of things can affect something like an Amazon, a Google, an eBay and all the others. How about bank sites and your finances? Your taxes?
It actually amazes me that there aren’t more screw-ups given how much code, how many characters, how many true-false statements make the world work today. It’s pretty astonishing.
It’s also something worth thinking about.
Update #1:
This is why the Amazon kerfuffle and #amazonfail are important: Clay Shirky, ‘The Failure of #amazonfail.’
Update #1:
Exacerbating this issue is Amazon’s communications. I see nothing on their home page referring to this. They have an Amazon Daily Blog that I found with absolutely no reference to the fiasco, just marketing rubbish. Why are they not in a dialogue with their customers? Why are they letting everyone else do the talking out on the Internet and not engaging their customers in a discussion?
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