iLike – No! Never Surrender To Your Users, Facebook

A business lesson for those that are interested in that sort of thing:

While I don’t fully agree with Michael Arrington’s application to Facebook of the concept posted in a recent article over at TechCrunch, he does pose a very valid point of innovation versus customer appeasement.  I’ll be writing up a more full blog post in my WorldOfTech blog in the next few days.  Here I wanted to highlight the intelligence of Michael’s post and encourage others to “look beyond” what customers are literally saying, and figure out what they really want.  You can never innovate if you don’t apply some real creativity to solving the problems presented by customers, instead of simply saying “if they want X, we’ll give them X”.

So next time you are presented with this type of situation, dig deeply to find what the customers really need instead of simply what they’re asking for.  If you’re really feeling innovative, you’ll fundamentally change their needs and improve their habits and methodologies all at once.