Radical Transparency: Three Lessons Apple Can Learn from Google

Google isn't exactly known as the most transparent company in the
world, but they're light years ahead of Apple - a company that in some
ways they share a kinship with when it comes to their reputation
for innovation. Apple (or for that matter any big company) can learn a
lot about radical transparency, customer service and PR from Google, even though they're hardly
perfect here.

First, Google does a great job of telling you where they're fallible.
Many Google products have pages that list the bugs that they know need
to be fixed. GMail and Google Docs
are just two. You can visit each of these pages for an update and even
let Google know if you're experiencing one of these issues.

Apple, by contrast, just lets you know when they've fixed bugs, but leave
it to bloggers to dig into the code to see just what was fixed. Most
Apple software update release notes from Apple simply say "Bug fixes."

Second, Google, like Apple, has forums where users can voice their
opinions about new features, gripes, wishes, use cases and more. Google
employees actively participate in these forums and you can track their
activity. Here's a page
that shows you all of the posts that a Google Reader forum guide,
"Roger," has responded to. Apple does the same in its forums.
Here's a list of all of the postings that Jason L has responded to.

However, the difference between the two is that users can rank the
posts of Google employees or even report misconduct. I give credit to
Apple for participating, however, I wished they would let users rate
employee postings.

Finally, Google has a ton of blogs. Most of them link back to the bloggers who link there. Some are beginning to allow for comments. Google Blogoscoped aggregates them here. Even better, all Google blog posts clearly identify the employee who authored the post and their title.

Apple meanwhile has one blog
for its much troubled MobileMe services, which I am probably dignifying
by calling it that. It's bascially a news feed of product updates. The
authors aren't identified. Worse, there are no comments or links to
other bloggers.

There are other companies in the tech industry that go even further than Google in their transparency - namely Dell and Microsoft (an Edelman client). However, Google and Apple are often closely linked in their cultures. The reality is, though, that when it comes to customer engagement, they are quite different.

Comments

[Ranjit Mathoda]

Must a company really be open in order to succeed? See my blog post "Internet truths that are often wrong: Disintermediation, Death of Distance and Open beats Closed" http://mathoda.com/archives/195

[Shane]

Nice!

Unfortunately, Apple aka Jobs and MSTF subscribe to the Old School mentality about controlling the conversation and therefore limiting bad press.

However, in Apple's defense, there is HUGE different between themselves and Google. Apple charges for their wares! While 99% of Google's goodies are FREE. So who's going to pay for something that is buggy? Cough iPhone 3G ;)

[Torley]

In turn, Google could learn some lessons in transparency and communication from smaller, more agile companies — many have noted how the official Google Blogs don't allow comments for whatever reason, and customer service (Gmail and such) is tough, if existent at all.

Granted, that's small compared to the YouTube (a Google asset) botch-ups that have happened, where many users have reported easily-noticeable, painful bugs, but it took YouTube/Google long — months — to react, and its own responses reeked of generic botdom, instead of being simple, conversational English. Here's one example of several.

Google has tools that help create community, but I haven't seen a lot of "personality" from them outside from a few standouts like Marissa Mayer. It's good to know some employees are participating in forums, but their visibility needs to be leveraged and amplified more for greater effect — both Google and customers benefit from knowing this.

I for one would love to see Google have an analogue to what Russell Brown does for spreading Adobe's creative wisdom.

[steven]

comparing a 10-year-old online company to a ~30-year-old hardware and software company. of course they're going to have different approaches.

[Torley]

One correction I should put forth: *some* Google blogs do allow comments. Not all. (And in-context, this is understandable.)

[Zac R]

What would Apple have to gain from being radically transparent, Steve? It's a fantastically successful and innovative company, rarely out of the news, and has a rabidly loyal customer base. Would emulating Google really make much of a difference to its bottom line?

[Sherif Karsu]

in the age of Web 2.0, Of course importance of transparency is inarguable but what the level of this transparency would be? I am not sure if we can compare Google's transparency policy to Apple's. Maybe being dependable is more important for Google since they don't charge for most of their products. I guess, It could be more risky for Apple to be as transparent as Google is.

[Vishal Jain]

Articles and content in this section of the website are really amazing. From http://www.endekeralam.com

[Lenny Rachitsky]

The thing that both are generally missing is any kind of uptime transparency. When issues come up, all we ever see is an error message and a bunch of twittering. Google does a pretty good job after the fact of explaining issues though. Another lesson Apple can learn from them, especially with all of the MobileMe problems.