[sachinag]

I love clueless product managers who have no idea about communities that they reach out to. This shit is not hard, folks.

If you are going to try to crowdsource something, you don't wave it in the face of the paid professionals. It's like asking the AIGA board if they'd like to do spec work on a redesign of MySpace.

If I was the PM, and I wanted to to take advantage of the fact that LinkedIn knows it has thousands of translators, I would have queried the pool to recommend someone else to translate. That's a process story that Facebook (or Twitter or whoever) can't match.

[vaksel]

only 300 people were enraged enough to join the group. That's pretty much the equivalent of a movie premiere being boycotted by a few dozen religious nutjobs.

You can't please everyone, and for every "enraged" person, who did the equivalent of signing an online petition, you have others who are glad to help and make your product better.

So you as a product manager, would choose to add $200-300K in expenses(for those professional translation services), just to appease a tiny percentage of users?

Out of those 300 people, how many do you think LinkedIn will lose as users? I'm thinking none. So in the end, they lost nothing, and saved a ton of money.

I didn't hear anyone bitching when facebook pretty much did the same thing...at least LinkedIn is offering some compensation.