PROMOTE CREATIVITY

Twitter started out as a service that would only produce plain text. When Twitter users began using hashtags on the service, Twitter initially resisted calls from users to officially support them. As hashtags continued to become popular, Twitter reversed course and embraced them, leading to an explosion of their use on the service. Today, hashtags—and thus Twitter—are “everywhere” and “impossible to ignore in our society.”

Amid a “negative public relations tsunami,” Keurig was forced to roll back a redesign of its coffee-maker that prevented competitors’ coffee pods from being used with the product. Online reviewers “rebell[ed]” against the change, and customers “voted with their dollars” against it. Keurig sales fell dramatically, leading the company to acknowledge its mistake and reverse its design decision.

Because users would have been unable to continue to use their previously purchased content once Google terminated the service, Google was forced to fully refund all payments for the service as well as keep the service active for an additional six months.

Microsoft was blasted as “gross, despicable, greedy, pathetic, cowardly and out of touch” after it announced a controversial policy that restricted sharing of games and required the console to connect to the Internet every 24 hours for games to work. “Things were looking bad” for Microsoft until the company fully reversed its DRM policies in response to “global outcry” and sluggish sales.