The Wrath of a Junior Designer

As technology industries watchers surely know, there was a foofaraw between Google and Yahoo yesterday. As Jeremy Zawodny reported:
Back when IE7 launched, Yahoo! created a customized version and began to market it to our existing IE users. Today it seems that Google has similar intentions. So similar, that they decided to basically copy our page and slightly Googlify it. If you look, the design, layout, and most of the text are the same!

Because it involves Google, Yahoo and a simple, blatant misstep, the story is everywhere: TechCrunch, Scoble, Techmeme, Digg and so forth.

Practically speaking, the actual error was no big deal. I imagine that some junior designer at Google was pressed for time, and just copied Yahoo’s effective approach. Still, it’s resulted in a torrent of bad PR from the technology community.

What are the lessons? The scale of the error and the scale of the response rarely match. More importantly, make sure your employees understand how much attention their work receives.

Tags: web+design, Yahoo, PR, crisis