While I agree that “you don’t have to rift a majority (…) to fit.”, I would argue that at least a significant amount of hatred is needed to counteract the love before the term ‘controversy’ comes to play. And controversy is what Boris’ article was all about as far as I understood.

Returning to the example of Google; I personally do not consider and have never considered Google controversial, due to the simple fact that the group of naysayers was and is so small compared to the group of enthusiasts. All of this of course isn’t hard science, it’s just my perception of things.

At the end of the day I think we agree, which is that you need users that love you. In the process of making people love you, you suffer a high risk of provoking hatred, in which case you should not panic nor should you take pride from it.

I think Google definitely fits the “garnered some hatred” model. You don’t have to rift a majority (like Scion for example) to fit.

I remember lots of talks about “those idiots with no business plan” and I still hear lots of people calling them one trick ponies. Early googlers have suffered plenty of headaches at the hands of naysayers.

My assumption is that they simply tried their best to ignore the naysayers and focus on the important thing: users.

I agree with Tyler more. It’s not the hate that is relevant, it’s the love. And very often the hate comes with the love, but not necessarily in significant quantity and many times only after a rather long period of time. Take Google for example. Even today, after years of huge success, there is not much hate towards Google. Controversial is definitely not a term that comes to mind when describing the company. The vast majority of people simply love Google, and the ones that don’t either work at Microsoft or took Orwell too serious.

The goal is to create a product that speaks so strongly to one group that they love it. With that success comes some hate, but the love you get is what’s important. Focus on the love your product gets as your important metric, and just know hate is a side effect and accept that it’s there and move on.