The PR department exists to do PR. Irregardless of the motivations of the people who contact them, sending a few official comments should be well within their ability.
That someone expressed interest in their products is something to be encouraged by a PR department. It's unfortunately that Steve responded at all. Surely ignoring the request would garner much less negative PR than repeated denials.
Creating available, consistent and learn-able interfaces is not that hard. Making them completely ignorance proof may be though.
Having to teach something is a reasonable part of any interface. Such as having a sign near elevator buttons that says "press the direction in which you want to travel". Or a cashier that says "no, use this pen." Or a website support person that guides an elderly man over the phone on the differences between a login box and a password recovery box.
Of course, it would be the ultimate aesthetic if interfaces would just do the magic, decide what the user really wanted, no thinking needed. I think this is the unreasonable ideal some designers dream of.
Even better, when we are born we could get a dialog box that says "Lead a Long, Fulfilling Life. OK, Cancel". But then we would have to learn to read to understand the dialog box. Maybe someone could press a button for us that makes us learn to read first. Or maybe an even more magical button could be designed, that when pressed, no one ever would have to read dialog boxes and press buttons ever again, or think or live. I think the Russians actually have a button like that.
I want to thank your department for the advance search sort on the left hand side, totally non-distracting and much easier to drill through than clicking the tiny advanced search link.
But please stop adding more distracting stuff to search. Like backgrounds, animated interactive logos, menus that fade into view only when you move your mouse, instant results flashing and distracting you constantly. A design like google.com circa 5 years ago seems to have been quite popular for all it's simplicity.
I worked on the left-nav and a bunch of the tools within it. It's nice to hear that somebody enjoys it.
It's interesting, though, how diverse opinions are on various features. I'm far more used to hearing "I hate you for putting a left nav on search. I want my screen real estate back!" And I get jealous of the guy who did the homepage fade and PacMan/Buckyball/colored-balls/Google-as-you-type doodles, because there've been generally positive user responses to those. Google Instant in general had an overwhelmingly positive user response.
I don't consider myself screwed at all. They held my money until I gave them proper documentation. When you run a business this kind of thing happens all the time. Just paying taxes to the government was way more complicated and intrusive.
Yes they can earn interest on money, but it's much more likely to me that they are covering their asses about the money rather than earning a small amount of interest on it.
Paypal has to deal with a lot of fraud. If you listen to the owners in interviews they say they lost a ridiculous amount of money in the early years to fraudulent users. It is reasonable for them, in my opinion, to make sure the money was owed to you before giving it to you.
In my ING Direct account (savings) I earn 1.1% APY currently, on 600.000 that is 6.600, that is 550 a month. If they freeze your accounts for two months, they have "earned" 1.100.
Now think of the amount of money going through paypal or sitting in paypal accounts, that is a fair chunk of change.
We are all miserable, as we tend to focus on what's wrong in our lives. The rich simply have a less desperate set issues to deal with. This has a desensitizing effect on how they relate to the reality of peoples real pain. The less you relate, and empathize with others, the more of a prick you seem.
So yeah, they would naturally give less to charity, and treat others more rudely to get what they want. There whole world is focused on experience and consumption, and not getting those concert tickets is as much of a psychological blow to them as me not being able to pay my rent.
People often fall into the self deceptive habit that thinking about doing something is doing something. Such truisms merit being in a self help article.
