You may remember that just a few days ago I wrote about the apparent incompatibility between some Foxconn motherboards and Linux. I concluded:

My belief is that these issues are not at all malicious, just a mistake that no one bothered to look for. The good news is that developers will probably learn soon that these mistakes lead to bad situations.

More recently, it seems that more light has been shed on the situation. A ZDNet blog post says that Foxconn has said that the problem seems to be in the BIOS software they purchased from American Megatrends and that they will be releasing a fix very soon.

I told you so.

If you think I wrote this post just to say “I told you so,” though, you are mistaken. There is a lesson to be learned here for PR people.

Let’s look at three cases where Linux users were blocked out of something: Citibank’s website, Foxconn’s motherboards, and the Fox News website. In the case of Citibank and Foxconn, the story turned into a huge anti-Citibank/Foxconn story. On the other hand, the Fox News story, at least eventually, turned into what could easily be seen as a positive story for Fox. Why? Really the only way in which these cases are different is that in the case of Citibank and Foxconn, the customer support essentially blamed the user. In the Fox case, however, Fox not only promptly fixed the problem but was also very transparent about the process.

The lesson for customer support people: don’t blame the user.

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