Perhaps it is the curse of being Number One – a future sociologist may already be penning a thesis on the phenomenon where companies become Number One and start to operate completely out-of-character. The companies seem to turn against the very principles that put them into first place and even more strangely start to take on an adversarial relationship with their own customers (Dell, Microsoft, Sony, HP and that’s just recently in the tech industry) .
Apple is now the Number One PC company and within weeks of that piece of news we get the iPhone 4 fiasco and a cover-up from a company that a few years ago would never have released buggy hardware – it would never have passed old Apple’s quality control and useability standards. Remember, Apple is the company that made Frog design a household world (for a while anyway) – why Steve Jobs didn’t use them for the iPhone OS 4 work is something that he should regret. Compounding the problem with a cover-up and then blaming its own customers for not holding the phone properly? Steve call in the Frogs - you blew it.
The other piece of the platform that has gotten Apple to where it is today is the App store. Have you tried to buy an App lately? Apple seems to be going out of its way to satisfy the lawyers and marketing folks and just paying lip service to design and useability – arguably the concepts that have finally gotten them to number one and increased their customer base. Some Apple critics have been comparing Apple to Big Brother (a riff on Apple’s famous 1984 Big Brother commercial) but Apple seems more and more like Big Nanny as it tries to protect its turf? its users? its investors? from the rest of the world. So, let’s go buy an iPhone App.