Comment by simonsquiff | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonsquiff | Hacker News Reader

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I can relate to this bit "More than once in my career I’ve been in a situation where something has gone wrong, sometimes catastrophically wrong. During situations like that, when every available hand is on deck trying to fix the problem, the most enraging thing in the world is a chorus of people who have no data, no real understanding of the issue, or even an understanding of the principles involved with the issue demanding answers NOW!"

It's frustrating when people in the company point the finger of blame without the data to back it up. Development teams are often those who suffer from this the most as they are where the buck stops - e.g. after a major software release there are issues that might be caused by installation errors/poor implementation/poor support response/user error but development get immediately blamed on 'poor product'.

I like that Jobs went down the whole clearly presented 'hard data' route to try to get to the heart of the problem; this is a good lesson on how to defend from criticism from those without knowledge of the real issues.

Mind you, hard data without even the possibility of independent verification, delivered far too late and after a string of PR blunders. Apple didn't just screw up, they kept screwing up by not respecting their customers enough to admit the problem early and giving much-needed data. Instead, they went down the route of being condescending and insulting to their customers ("you're holding it wrong"). That fierce Apple fanboyism that enables the company can rather severely backfire if Apple forgets, as it has done throughout the iPhone's short history, that their customers are intelligent human beings capable of making their own choices and coming to their own conclusions.

Indeed, the timeliness is questionable - I wasn't impressed with the slide saying the number of days since the issue was raised, as all that time there had been silence (not even "we're looking into it and getting back to you soon"). But ignoring the response time I think the approach to the response was the right one - i.e. data driven, and that is a good lesson for those in a similar finger pointing shit storm albeit on a radically different scale.

In what way has Apple forgot that their customers are reasoning individuals? I don't see how you come to that conclusion in this case, but you seem to argue that this has happened before?

Well, by their behavior with respect to pornographic or erotic apps, their response to jailbreaking, their decision to completely lock the device against unauthorized apps, and their censoring of books and comics over non-sexualized nudity. From the very beginning, Apple has demonstrated a near complete dismissal of their customers' ability to make decisions for themselves, as can be seen from their decision to make a walled-garden sort of marketplace where customers can play around without getting hurt.

With respect, I think a lot of reasoning individuals who are Apple customers like or are at least indifferent to the walled garden approach. Just as those saying that they get better reception from the iPhone 4, or saying nothing at all like or are at least indifferent to the antenna design.

It seems that many critics of the walled garden approach as well as the antenna design have a hard time realizing (or conveniently forget) that those not complaining loudly aren't necessarily mindless drones who buys anything with an Apple logo on it.

So in my mind, I'd say that there are huge amounts of intelligent, reasoning individuals who are using the iPhone 4 at the moment who like the phone as it is. So while I agree that they should have done more when it comes to telling the world they were on the case, even though I doubt it would have helped much, I think your image of how badly Apple treat their users is vastly exaggerated.

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