Apple: two strikes down (one to go)

 

Open Letter to Apple

September 19, 2007 

Apple Apple Apple. You make great, innovative, useful products to say the least. I love you as a company and love seeing how much more successful you’ve become over the last decade. However, you’ve made some wrong turns lately. The one delivered on September 5th you quickly rebounded from. But this rebound was only caused by the many complaints you received. Is that how you treat your most loyal (dare I say “fan-boy”) customers who wait in line for your product, sleep outside your stores in anticipation, pay high monthly prices for contracts (from which you receive a hefty cut) with AT&T, and recommend you to their friends and family? Lucky for you, Apple, that brief customer exasperation has passed – but in the eyes of many – your amazing innovative reputation had been made a little murky. 

But now again? Why is it that current owners of iPod games need to purchase the same games again (for the same prices) just so they would work on your new iPods? At what point do you stop caring about the costumer satisfaction – which not only depends, as you must know, on your products – but on their prices? Did the memo not reach everyone at Apple about these iPod games? Did the marketing department forget about current users and simply decide to give them the short end of the stick? As you surely must know, these current users are the ones who gave you the chance to make these new iPods in the first place. Their spending for your products and services allowed you as a company to push the R&D to its limits on the new iPods. Who dropped the ball?

This is really simple: don’t rip off your customer. This move is a pure rip off and makes the customer trust you even less. You are slowly turning into the vendor at the supermarket who, after selling me ten green apples for $5, charges me another $5 to carry them out of the store in a plastic bag because my hands are full. The point is, this practice is unacceptable and it is becoming common place for you to mistreat the customer. You really need to rethink your strategies about how you treat those who pay your bills; the first time you got lucky. This time we will have to see. Granted, the fiscal effect on the consumer this time around is not as big as the first time, but it’s not the morally (and socially) correct way to treat your customer, period.

If there is a third time, you might lose much more credibility and consumer trust. Do the right thing, Apple: offer current iPod game owners the reformatted games for the new iPods for free. That’s the way you should have done it from the start.

You are a company that makes complicated technology simple to use. Make this simple, without the sorry technological excuse of the iPod OS being re-engineered; the consumer shouldn’t even notice this.

Thanks for listening,

Alex Luft 

Posted in Apple, Blogroll, Business, Decisions, iPhone