Less than a month ago, a Google pen ran out of ink while Scott Grieder, a Group Product Manager at Ask.com, was trying to take notes with it. Ask pointed this out in a witty (and somewhat disparaging) blog post, and now Google has sent its competitor at least one more pen, along with an amusing note of its own.
Google and Ask may be rivals, but it appears that neither company has lost its sense of humor. Ask’s sense of fair play is also intact: it gave the same amount of attention to Google’s response as it did to the initial “lapse in this fundamental Google product/service.”
As reported by the Ask.com Team, then, the letter from Google reads, “We noted your suboptimal experience with our Google pen and are thus pleased to send you – at no charge – a replacement set.
“Fortunately,” the handwritten note continued, “our pen architecture is based upon Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Drafting Stuff. If any individual component fails, a quick recovery is ensured.
“We wish you a long and happy writing experience,” it concluded.
Wasn’t that nice of Google? Ask blurred out the sender’s name, but Barry Schwartz speculates that Adam Lasnik (“Search Evangelist”) is the man behind the letter. This sort of lighthearted back-and-forth is decidedly better than a certain other exchange between search companies’ representatives.
To read more about how this Ask-Google conversation started, you can view our original coverage here. Thanks to both companies for providing a bit of humor within the search engine world.
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