• TechCrunch, Wednesday, March 25, 2009 11:15 AM

Michael Arrington wonders about the wisdom of crowds in his reaction post to Facebook changing its redesign because of user backlash. He and other bloggers argue that many great products would never have been built if the designers had asked for customer input. Robert Scoble, for one, argues that a Porsche would be a Volvo if the company let its buyers decide the features.

Says Arrington: "The bottom line is, when you listen to your users, you get vanilla. Feature creep. Boring. It takes a dictator to create the iPhone and change the course of an entire industry. Imagine if Steve Jobs let other people add features to that device." As such, he's surprised that Facebook is folding in the face of user backlash to its latest redesign. He notes that the company has stood tall in the face of such backlashes before; remember the news feed? Nowadays, most people can't imagine Facebook without it.

If the company wanted to keep these changes, Arrington said it shouldn't have titled its blog post "Responding to Your Feedback," because that just invites more feedback. "Someday, if they're not careful, someone is going to do to Facebook what Facebook did to MySpace, who in turn did it to Friendster," he says. "Making users happy is a suckers game. Pushing the envelope is what makes you a winner."

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