I have said it before and I shall do so again. I am not an Apple user. However, I cannot help but marvel at the skill of their brush when it comes to building user interfaces as well as their marketing precision in creating niches and dominating them. I personally applaud Steve Jobs’ letter on why Apple will not accept Flash. I thought it provided excellent reasons all of which I agree with. However, the hardcore, nigh militaristic, means of 4th gen iPhone retribution is one of the largest fiascoes I have bared witness to in a long time.
On a very small level, I like Flash. I think it greatly helps smaller development teams achieve high levels of interactivity, if used properly. Unfortunately, I rarely see Flash used properly. Even with simple things like ads, I see Flash crashing browsers, slowing down performance, bugging or breaking pages, taking up huge amounts of system resources, etc. The problem with Flash is you don’t have to be technically proficient at it to use it. Heck, you could never code a day in your life and still use it. This is one of the great parts of Flash, but novices rarely check to ensure their code is concise, if it uses only the objects that is required for the Flash project, if it optimized, if it will work fine on all browsers, etc. And Jobs also made it clear that they have done wonders without Flash, so quite honestly, why would they need it?
Now the two steps back. I am not going to rehash everything here because the story has been beaten to death. I would say look at what Renay San Miguel said about it in his article Lost iPhone Brings Scoundrels, Sharks, and Shysters out of the Woodwork.
I don’t consider the issue a First Amendment issue. Gizmodo’s first responsibility is to their audience. They have a history of finding information on new gadgets and telling the world about it. This sort of thing is not only expected, but it’s the sole reason why they are successful. They meet some guy who has new technology and was willing to give them a first look for a small price. Again this is standard stuff in the world of tech journalism. It really is no different than an investigative reporter bribing people to find sources for the deplorable conditions found in large meat processing plants. Sorry, forgot, it’s not a bribe, it’s a gift.
If the device was so amazing that it required law enforcement to break down a door and raid a home office, then what the heck was it doing in some engineer’s hands outside of the company office? Why was it taken into a bar? Why isn’t the engineer being charged with some sort of civil lawsuit for negligence or even industrial sabotage? The reaction to what Gizmodo did is the type of reaction you would see in a bomb making case, not in something as simple as getting a scoop on a story.
I think the thing that gets me the most out of all of this is that it shows two things about Apple. One, it shows on some level that they have no class. This could have been handled quite easily in another way instead of having the REACT Gestapo brought in. Two, it shows that while Apple is marketing savvy in more traditional venues they have a lot to learn about exploiting bad moments. If I ran up Apple’s marketing team I would have seen this as the perfect opportunity for huge amounts of high grade PR. An opportunity like this could have easily given Apple several extremely well placed evangelists, a show that Apple is a class act (which 60/40 they are already), free marketing, and community involvement.
Instead, their overreacting to this situation has cast doubts as to the glamour that was Apple and has wrought the possibility that maybe Apple is the next Evil Empire.
