I have posted a news for about 10 days about the acquisition of a French blogging tool maker called U-Blog by one of the major actor world-wide in this field – Six Apart.
The last days, the French blogosphere was shaked by a lot of very emotional and agressive discussions concerning this acquisition. Some U-Blog’s clients claimed that Loic Le Meur, the CEO of U-Blog and now Executive VP of Six Apart, did doomed the strong community around U-Blog and killed the platform with this acquisition. Loic bought U-Blog for a while, developped it, and managed to organize the integration of U-Blog within Six Apart – which is, to my point of view, a great management and entrepreneurial success for Loic and his European team. If you are interested in, you can find more detail about the story here. The story presented is ok, I do not fully agree with all the comments and interpretations of the author, Stephanie. I published more or less the same comments presented below on her blog here.
Here my impressions and comments:
i think that this story is a typical french one. why? we are confronted here with some strong but existing and real french stereotypes: french people do not like entrepreneurs, they do not like successful managers, they do not like (and/or trust) people who are communicating in english, the level of understanding of the business reality is incredibly low…and french people do not care about that! our remaining arrogance?
nothing, i mean – really – nothing can excuse impoliteness, impropriety, or libels in a discussion such like this one. i find personally loic very patient in this field with some of his clients.
we see here clearly a side effect of using the blogs as a base for business communication. a few unsatisfied people can have a huge impact on the overall customer community and its feeling. some posts are acting as “unguided missiles” in the blogosphere. on the other hand, is the propagation of information really working in another way in the “real” world?
i don’t think that loic is not understanding his clients or that he is not communicating well. i personnaly think that he is investing too much time and energy with this little number of unsatisfied customers! Before taking them seriously, they have to have themselves realistic expectations. by staying on this very emotional, agressive und unconstructive level, it will be so or so impossible to find a solution. it is not possible to satisfy all customers. by loosing the focus on serving the majority of your clients and investing time in trying to satisfy the unrealistic expectations of the minority, you could kill your business. The kind of motto “the client is – always – king” is quite dangerous to my mind.
I would like to say that I know Loic only from his blogs. I have nothing to do with U-Blog, Six Apart, MovableType or TypePad. I’m actualling blogging with Blogger (oups, sorry for that, Loic ;-), my own hoster and blogkomm.
So, what do you think?
