"Is Apple the Worst Company Ever At Public Relations?"
whydoeseverythingsuck.com
whydoeseverythingsuck.com
Anyone remember the iPhone launch when people asked about an SDK? Jobs said there's no need for one ("the web is your SDK!" or something along those lines) and people started parroting that line whenever this valid criticism was brought up. Now that they have an SDK, albeit one with ridiculous and draconian restrictions, people are still parroting Apple's lines: You can't have background processes because of security[1]! You must submit to the App Store because Apple knows better than people what they should be allowed to have!
Think I'm being hard and unfair towards Apple? Then just imagine other companies doing what Apple does and ask yourselves what the reaction will be:
-What will happen if BlackBerry's email service goes down periodically and loses your email?
-What will happen if Microsoft demands 30% of all developer revenues for their products and limits the distribution of applications?
[1] Choosing security over liberty... where have I heard this line before?
And Apple can't figure out why they haven't penetrated the corporate market...
I think Apple's reasons for not having penetrated the corporate market are more a result of their primary market position/niche and their lack of REALLY trying. I mean as a company over the last 20 years, they haven't done the things that SAP, IBM, Cisco, Sun, etc... have been doing: totally different marketing approaches, totally different primary target demographics, totally different history of corporate VIP shmoozing, really a totally different type SW/HW.
I'm pretty sure the folks at Apple have a 10x clearer picture of this than I do, and aren't scratching their heads in wonder:)
"totally different marketing approaches, totally different primary target demographics, totally different history of corporate VIP shmoozing, really a totally different type SW/HW."
How in the _world_ is that at all in disagreement with what I'm saying? Apple markets itself to be 'cool'. Apple "hype" is substantively different than HP "hype". Being 'cool' means you're only accountable to keep being 'cool'. Hyping reliability, while perhaps still hype, is an expectation of the system. That's, for instance, why Apple stopped pushing the "just works" line for the Xserve. Too many people pointed out too many times that, in fact, it doesn't 'just work'. Apple "hyped" in a new direction, and they got burned for it.
My experience with most corporate vendors is that they are 90% hype, old-boy-network, shmoozing, or a "safe bet". In general I'd rather use an Apple product than a more mainstream corporate vendor product, assuming they're solving the same need.
So my apologies, I'd mis-interpreted your post.
I will however take issue with the veracity of this: "But that _doesn't_ cut it in most corporate environments. If you've told me X is going to do Y, it sure as hell better do Y or there's 10 other vendors waiting to replace you."
I can't tell you how many times I've seen vendors who have caused week long delays, production system outages, failed uptimes, breech of contract, unreliable hardware (not just a single box, but an entire line), buggy software, and the consequences are.... an apology on a con-call. "Oh we can't replace them, it's a corporate standard" or "well, our contract with them is another 3 years, so..." or "replacing their system would cause too much disruption". I've seen a totally useless, misleading, etc... vendor replaced just once in 10 years in enterprise environments.
Quite frankly I think that is one of the reasons companies love targeting large corporations. It's slower to get in, but once you're in, it's almost impossible to be fired by your client. A home PC user can ditch a phone, computer, mp3 player, etc... a million times easier than a large corporation can replace a vendor who has a 5 year contract, whose SVP golfs with your CEO, who has 5,000 products in place in your org, that 5,000 people have been trained on, that have to be uninstalled by trained folks, and hauled off by union labor, etc...
How often have you really seen a vendor to a large corp being replaced versus the number of times they've failed to deliver?
Of course you don't mean across the board. You mean for a specific closed HW device via a specific channel right?
Sort of like games being sold on XBox live?
From three days ago: "Microsoft announced today that user-created games will be sold on Xbox Live through a new Community Games section starting this fall, with developers taking 70 percent of the revenue."
So yeah, let's see what the outraged reaction looks like. So far I think it's been happy developers. But yes, I suspect that you are being hard and unfair towards Apple. Time will tell if there is a huge user backlash and revolt toward Microsoft.
For your comparison to be valid, you'd have to consider the industries you're talking about. Microsoft operates within some pretty standard console industry practices - charging (relatively) small amounts for tools/licences etc. What they do is what Nintendo, Sony, etc all do and thus are neither bad nor good in this respect.
Now take a look at the smartphone market (major competitors being RIM and MS): APIs are pretty open, allow much more integration, users have much more freedom of choice, developers have freedom of distribution, speech etc.
Apple may be better than traditional cell phones, but they fail in comparison with their peers in this respect.
Just to give you an illustration, the last two projects I did had mobile components. I could not do an iPhone version of the first one for lack of background processes, and I can't do the second for lack of APIs that allow access to the phone's system settings. Meanwhile, a friend of mine is developing a horribly crippled medical device monitoring application, because the iphone allows bluetooth pairing for audio devices only.
None of these problems exist on the BB, Android and likely WinMo. So no, I am definitely not being hard on apple at all.
Everyone will switch to their competition. But that's because email is BlackBerry's core business.
- What will happen if Microsoft demands 30% of all developer revenues for their products and limits the distribution of applications?
What, you mean like they do for XBox?
From the Wikipedia on "Xbox Development Kit": "Only developers that are licensed by Microsoft may compile code and release binaries (.XBEs)of their software with the XDK, any software released using the XDK by developers that aren't licensed is illegal."
I think the answer in the XBox case is "Customers buy a lot of software anyway."
These complaints about Apple are legit (their crazy SDK NDA is really frustrating), but they're still early-adopter nitpicking. The iPhone SDK is not the core of Apple's business: They made plenty of iPhone profits even when they didn't have one, and they had plenty of happy customers. Apple's currently-FUBARed email services aren't the reason that I bought a pair of Macs: I bought the Macs because they run Unix tools just fine, they've got modern browsers, they've got iTunes, the printers just work, there's a lot of available audio and video software that just works, they can run Photoshop, they can run Windows and Linux via VMWare or Parallels, they're kind of pretty to look at, they've got an amusing online fanbase, etc, etc.
All of that still works. None of it goes away just because some software that was released last week doesn't work yet. If you don't want to be burned like an early adopter don't be an early adopter.
One difference between Apple and Microsoft is that, when Microsoft released their new operating system, it reportedly performed poorly when running everyday apps on existing hardware with formerly-supported peripherals. The result is that... many people remained Microsoft customers but just went back to XP. They refused to be early adopters. Problem solved. Unfortunately for Microsoft, the other difference between them and Apple is that Microsoft's product development cycle is now eight years long, so late adopters will wait a very long time before upgrading...
This is a pretty good example of the power of branding. Customers (on the whole, not necessarily individually) are willing to overlook poorly functioning applications, lost data, expensive hardware, DRM, near-instant depreciation, lack of APIs, and so on because the positive feeling that brand imparts balances out the negatives.
As martythemaniak points out in his comment, if Microsoft were to try some of these things, the press and blogs would be all over it.
At the least, this sort of behavior from the big players in a market has one upside: It creates an opportunity for an upstart to come in and compete on service.
Then watch as the sales rep (assuming you have a good one) struggles to help fix the situation. But they are as powerless as you are. And they weren't told any sooner than you were.
So then you go to the Apple support forums to see if anyone's figured out a way around the problem. Except the thread that had decent activity and a few decent leads disappeared.
But it sure feels good pulling out my Mac in an airport.