Author: Christopher Carfi

As originally noted here and here, there have been accusations of workers being run into the ground at Electronic Arts. Today, NPR is reporting that three heroes of the revolution employees (Jamie Kirschenbaum, Mark West and Eric Kearns) have filed a class action suit against EA for failing to pay overtime compensation. The lawsuit alleges, among other things:

“In failing to properly compensate Plaintiffs and the Class for overtime hours worked, Defendants acted maliciously, oppressively, and/or fraudulently, and such despicable conduct designed to maximize the Defendants’ economic gain was carried out with the wrongful intention of causing injury to Plaintiffs and the Class, in willful and conscious disregard of the rights of Plaintiffs..”

A quick scan seems to say that anyone who worked for EA in a similar role as Kirchenbaum, West and Kearns between July 29, 2000 and whenever the case gets resolved may be part of the class.

If you’re into lawyerese, the full complaint is up here.

As this evolves, three things to watch for:

1) The original post from ea_spouse has now generated nearly four thousand comments. Will that post, ea_spouse, or any of the commenters be involved in this in any way, either as part of the proceedings or as members of the class?

2) In skimming some of the chatter around the original ea_spouse post, it seems that the practices around overtime and a high-stress, micromanaged work environment may be endemic to the whole games industry. Will other game providers also face similar lawsuits?

3) What, if any, will be the customer reaction to this? Will customers begin to move to fix this, a la Nike?

(this post had originally started out as a response to Jay Rosen’s comment here, but then one thing led to another and, well, you know how these things happen…)

Google search: “I hate RealNetworks“: 92 results
Google search: “I love RealNetworks“: 0 results

Real *is* an interesting case. One line of discussion could be: “How does a company that brutalizes customers, ruins desktops, forces actions, and bombards users with phony upgrade messages stay around?” However, I think the crunchier aspect is to ask the question “What are customers who are feeling brutalized doing about it? And how?”

Since there seems to be more work to do here, we’ll be chugging down a couple of parallel paths:

Path 1) If anyone has any stories, either pro or con, regarding Real, would love to hear them. Comment away!

Path 2) I will be going out and trying to collect and solicit some additional data points (not unlike the MSN Spaces discussion of last week), as well as see what, if anything, Real has done to address any of the issues raised.

That action taken, there is another interesting aspect to this discussion. Jay states:

“And here you’re [the] blogger for the social customer perspective and all you have is some lame, cliched line when Jarvis rips them: ‘tell us how you really feel?'”

In the case of that post, the answer is “yes.” Sometimes, I’m all about the cliches. And the snark. In case there was any doubt, I’m going to out myself right here: I heart the snark.

I personally have given up, written off, and completely exorcised Real from my online existence. The only time within recent memory that I’ve interacted with them in any fashion was during the 2004 debates, where I signed up for the two week trial of their service in order to get full streaming video of the coverage. I too despise them for having intrusive, overweight, and altogether clumsy products and services. (Full disclosure: I watched the debate and then cancelled that same night.) As such, I really didn’t intend to spend many personal cycles thinking about Real. They’re dead to me, so I had no reason to elaborate further. I simply found the Jarvis comment to be a good example of a customer who was speaking out in unambiguous terms about one of his service providers.

There are varying types of posts you will see in this space. Posts are the blogger’s tools. Some, like this one, are participation in an ongoing discussion. Some, like the posts on how technologies such as blogs, wikis, social networks, etc. are affecting the customer experience, will be researched and (gasp!) maybe even edited. Some other posts, like the post that initiated this whole discussion, may simply be pointers to other sources out in the media/blogosphere that seem to exemplify the idea(l) of the social customer.

The tool reflects the task.

Ubermarketingguruguy Seth Godin has sold a gazillion copies of his books, and has had his e-books downloaded ten gazillion times. The trouble is, according to Jeff Jarvis and Doc Searls, that they (his readers and customers) hate the format his e-books are in.

“Seth Godin is the god of listening to your customer, giving your customer what your customer wants, giving your customer something extra, making your customer feel special. But for some reason, he refuses to give many of us customers what we want: HTML. I ranted about it again and again. No response then.” (the full rant from Jeff)

“Have I made it clear I hate .pdfs? I do. Says here ‘our PDFs don’t suck.’ Because they’re beautiful and ‘a joy to read.’ Excuse me, they do suck if what they contain isn’t also on the Web in relatively ugly but open, unowned, nonproprietary, standard and non-infuriating HTML…” – (the full rant from Doc)

So, Seth does the right thing and replies, publicly. Unfortunately, he completely dissed his customer in doing so.

“Anyway, we use PDFs because they’re a lot more booklike. They read better. They stick together when you forward them. They print better. I know they’re not in HTML. There are 6 trillion other web pages to choose from if you want that.”

Wow. Translation: “I’m going to keep doing things this way because it’s better for me this way, and you, Mr. Customer, can go somewhere else if you don’t like it.”

We here at The Social Customer Manifesto would also like to humbly point out that this page is created with 100% HTML, for the convenience of those customers who prefer it.

Jeff Jarvis is not shy in sharing his thoughts on Real and the issues he ran into in using RealPlayer to access online news content from ABC News.

I had to walk through glass to watch two minutes [of video using Real]. And then when I tried
to cancel it all, I had to stay on hold on not one but two calls to
Real for 40 friggin’ minutes. Real sucks. Real Audio sucks. Real Video
sucks.

So Jeff…get off the fence.  How do you really feel about it?

In a related post, he does pose some very sage suggestions on how broadcast news can better manage their content and give viewers what they want, where and when they want it.