“It’s time to move from the email era to the Facebook era.” That was the first thing that crossed my mind when I read Phil Wainewright’s insightful blog post today about “Web giants and the helpless individual." Phil talks about how difficult it is to get good support from some of the big Web application companies when things go wrong. He writes, “The common theme with all these stories is a fundamental flaw with the business model of cloud services, which is predicated on fully automated systems — fine when everything works as expected, but not fine when the failure is unexpected, unbudgeted or involves parameters the developer didn’t think of when the system was designed.”

So how could such successful companies get into such a mess?

In his book, The Effective Executive, lauded by The Wall Street Journal as perhaps the best business book ever written, Peter Drucker explores this concept of “automation” and its counter balance, “exception handling”. As Drucker puts it, “[organizations] solve generic situations through rule and policy …. [but need a] way to test whether the assumptions on which a decision had been made are still valid or whether they are becoming obsolete and need to be thought through again…. Failure to go out and look is the typical reason for persisting in a course of action long after it has ceased to be appropriate or even rational.”

This seems to explain what has happened with these struggling Web giants. They built their businesses in a different era. Though they are Web giants today, when it comes to customer support, they were actually born in a different era and their support processes demonstrate as much. But today things are different. Now, it’s all about social collaboration and community. So, to quote my favorite 13 year old: “Get with it people! It’s time to move from the email era to the Facebook era!”