Ok, that is a broad statement, but ShutterFly has an MBA driven feature that has made me so mad I got up out of bed early on a Saturday to write about it: Once you load your pictures in you can’t get them back out.

It’s not like you don’t have a backup copy on your computer (or at least I hope you do!) but if you need a picture, well, Mr. Gullible Customer, here is an order form for a ridiculously profitable CD-ROM. Note, not a DVD, because that would hold more pictures.

Well, they can hold their breaths until they turn red and their mommies give them a lollipop and I’m not going to give them my Xmass card business this year.

Ok, I feel better now, especially as I’m going to spread this story around and chip off at least 0.000005% of their annual revenues.

But the reason I didn’t write about this on my personal blog (which is chock-full of ranting goodness) is because it made me wonder if we’d done anything MBA evil ™ in our business? I mean, I don’t think we did, if you define that as ‘deceiving customers for the purpose of increasing revenues.’ We do segment our products to maximize profit, but we try to do that in a way that our customers receive the maximum benefit from their spend.

Is this a perfect science? No. Take Cable TV pricing. It’s in tiers. You know all about that. It’s such a contentious thing that Congress (which apparently has nothing better to do!) has held hearings on it to make sure it is not “illegal bundling” whatever that is.

But you know, it works for me. My cable company offers six tiers, four sports packages, and six movie packages. We have two tiers and one movie package. And I’m perfectly satisfied. Oh, sure, I’d like to have HD movies without buying the HD tier, but I only miss that the once a month I pay-per-view a movie. So the Cable guys got it 99.9% right in my opinion. So I vote “No” on the MBA Evil index for cable tiers, in my case at least.

But last night, when steam was coming out my ears, I sent an email to fifteen or twenty people and asked them if they would be upset to have to pay their online photo vendor to get a high-resolution copy of their photo’s back. The responders results were interesting: 60% were outraged, 25% said it never occurred to them but they’d be outraged at the delay (I thought that was interesting), and 15% said they didn’t care.

Now, while the plural of anecdote is not data, that should give the ShutterFly (and other MBA Evil practitioners) some pause. Because that “feature” was not an accident.

So I’ve called an all-hands review on Monday to look at our feature set and stack rank the things that might annoy our customers - either now or when they run into some issue. Then we’ll have our prettiest phone voice call a few of our more voluble customers and ask them some questions.

Maybe, just maybe, the Evil ShutterFly denizens might have saved me some customers. I certainly hope they saved me from someone writing a post like this about my company!