1. Not so much “Lovin it”

    Monday, 14 Jan 2008 View Comments Posted by: Sean O'Driscoll

     

    This was sent to me today:

    http://www.mcdonalds.com/contact/contact_us/unsolicited_ideas.html

     

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    • Sean
      Great, thanks for bringing this to the thread M3!

      sean
    • Actually, Sean, Microsoft _does_ have a place for people to submit unsolicited proposals ;) https://members.microsoft.com/omc/Welcome.aspx  The Opportunity Management Center (OMC) was set up to provide potential partners with a managed way to submit business proposals to Microsoft."Preliminary feedback and next steps will be communicated by email within 15 business days. "The Proposal Submission Tool guides you through the submission process. For additional information or details about the process, please review the FAQ or other program resources listed in the left navigation bar."
    • Along the same lines, Target Tells a Blogger to Go Away http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/28/business/medi...

      "Unfortunately we are unable to respond to your inquiry because Target does not participate with nontraditional media outlets," a public relations person wrote to ShapingYouth.
    • It isn't an insane policy. I mean, in a litigious society, you run into too many issues.

      1) The person submitting the idea might get some ideas of their own when the company takes said idea and makes millions upon millions of dollars off of the idea.

      2) If said idea causes a lawsuit against the company by a consumer (say, for instance, a new coffee cup design has a major failure), the company may turn around and put a lawsuit against the person submitting the idea.

      Also, looking at some of the other reasons why McDonald's refuses unsolicited product ideas, there's a very good reason there: The amount of time it takes to preprocess the idea. Believe me, I've triaged enough bugs at Microsoft to see that the majority of them had already been submitted by someone else. The lack of a good search engine on that front caused a major expenditure in hours for someone to actually review the bugs and make sure they weren't duplicates.

      Oh, and sorry to burst your bubble Sean, but MS does in fact have such a policy about unsolicited ideas. http://www.microsoft.com/info/cpyright.mspx#EVE

      Now, there is a tremendous difference between *solicited* feedback and *unsolicited* feedback.
    • Sean
      Microsoft has no such policy...The challenge is more likely that there are too many ways to give suggestions and feedback which makes idea management and follow up difficult. http://connect.microsoft.com/ is one such visible place.

      sean
    • some months ago I saw something similar with Apple. I think that few companies (like Microsoft) have real ears to listen the customers.
    • Around 12 years ago, I storyboarded an idea for a theme park ride based around Toy Story and sent it to Disney - the response I got was basically the above, Mickey couldn't use unsolicited ideas :-(

      Whats Microsoft's stance on this kind of thing?
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