Saturday, January 05, 2008

Emergence in action: Plaxo is an ex-canary

Plaxo's opt out mechanism was broken the other day. I see variations of this all the time, at work and at home.

Everyone has finite resources. Do they put those into sales, marketing, maintaining core services, or making sure "opt out" or "account termination" or "data transfer" or interoperability services are working?

Obviously services that allow customers to leave are the first to go when times get tough. Exit services are the proverbial canary in the coal mine -- they die first. When customers complained about problems leaving AOL, AOL was on the way to the grave.

Nobody has to plan these sorts of emergent behaviors. They're inevitable.

Plaxo is an ex-canary.

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