Brand Loyalty & The Viable Alternative

I've been doing some musing on this subject over the past month or six weeks. First you need some background to set the context.

This is about Apple. I've been brand loyal to Apple for the whole of the life of their flagship product - the Mac. I've either owned or used the Mac for all of that time. At various times I've run whole businesses on the Mac and since the late 1980s I have owned a Mac or Macs continuously. I like the product and despite the limitations of the earlier operating systems I've stuck with it. There are multiple Macs in the stable at the moment.

Recently an iPhone 3Gs was added to the collection. That is the point that got me wondering seriously about the other side of Apple. The iPhone is a pretty cynical exercise and I've blogged about both its shortcomings and its benefits - I'll leave you to find that. But here are two examples of a pretty cynical approach to me - the brand loyal customer:

First is the matter of Bluetooth. In the iPhone Bluetooth is a crippled shadow of its true self. Now this can't be a technical limitation because Bluetooth is a mature capability that is widely and effectively used in mobile devices by many manufacturers. I've come to the view that the limitations in Bluetooth (try sending a contact to your mate with a "brand x" mobile via Bluetooth from your iPhone) are simply driven by Apple's cynical view of what it wants to achieve with the iPhone. Note that - it's not what the user wants to achieve, rather it's what Apple wants to achieve. Pity about the customer.

The second example is Telstra and tethering with the iPhone. On the message boards you'll find comments from users who report having been told by Telstra "Apple is stopping us from offering tethering". Then you'll find posts from users who report having been told by Apple "Telstra is the one who is stopping tethering". Well all I can say is that they can't both be right! Again a cynical approach to the customer. If Apple cared about the customer then I would be able to tether my iPhone. Apple could fix this if it wanted to. Instead they delivered a "fix" in OS 3.1 that stopped all the users who had hacked tethering. I hadn't BTW. Why is it that iPhone users can't tether? Why is it even a topic of conversation? Other mobile devices have been able to tether for ever, why the issue with iPhone? It should simply be able to be done out of the box just like every other device. Delusions of world dominance anyone?

I really feel that the customer isn't at the centre of that universe. This isn't about customer centricity but about the dominance of corporate strategy.

Let's move on to Snow Leopard. I've blogged about my issues with Snow Leopard. I upgraded because I had faith that Apple would have properly tested the system and done the right thing by the customer. As you know there have been problems and big problems, stop the business style problems with Mail. But let's be clear about Apple's priorities here, their corporate priorities: iTunes was upgraded to version 9 recently and in short order we got an upgrade to 9.0.1 - very responsive, only I don't know anyone who was having problems with iTunes. But of course iTunes is a huge money spinner for Apple, unlike Mail. Feeling cynical anyone?

That brings me to my theory of the viable alternative. In my experience people make change for one compound reason: They hate poor delivery and they hate hubris. They have one pre-condition for making change when they see poor delivery and hubris: they ask themselves is there a viable alternative.

Note that, it's not "is there something better", rather it's "is there a viable alternative". Put that another way: product excellence won't cut it over poor service and a perception of a lack of interest in the customer. Customers will "chuck out the incumbent" if there is a halfway decent alternative.

I'm personally at that point with Apple: I think there are viable alternatives. Are they better than Apple products - maybe not. Does Apple demonstrate that they care enough about the customer to keep me? No they don't. Therefore I'm open to viable alternatives. A Google Android device anyone?

Apple Snow Leopard - Update - The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

This is like a post to tell the aunts how the behaviour of the problem child has been - in this case Snow Leopard. Well the short answer is not great. But I've fixed a couple of things and found a much more problematical issue.

So first the good news. The GCC printer first. This printer had been on the network for months and doing its stuff perfectly well. Then I upgraded to Snow Leopard and it disappeared. In this model - the GCC Elite XL 20/600 - you set the IP address as a static IP somewhere in the range that you are using. The printer had had the same static IP address for months. As part of the diagnostics around the problem I had checked the IP address and all the other settings multiple times. No other device was using that IP address or anything near it. All was well but still no printer.

Finally in one of those random and senseless acts I changed the IP address to another address in the range. Hey presto there was the printer, I could ping it, add it in the prefs and use it. There is no rational reason I can think of why this should have worked but hey, this is Snow Leopard. Still I now have a working printer.

The second breakthrough was with iSync. We have a Sony Ericsson W705a that we wanted to sync using iSync. We had been doing this under Leopard with no dramas. Snow Leopard said that it was a "non supported" phone or some similar language. I removed the Sony Ericsson plugins, downloaded them again (albeit the same version), installed them again and still nothing. I removed the phone from the "Phones" directory in the Library and then recreated it. I couldn't add the phone to iSync as a device. I searched the support discussions, restarted the computer, did everything I could think of. Then I stumbled on someone who had found that the permissions on the plugins directory were screwed up. So I went and had a look at that only to find that I had no permissions on that directory at all. I fixed that and that solved the problem. I could add and sync the phone!

Again this is a seemingly random event. I had been running these plugins under Leopard and syncing this phone. I had repaired permissions after each install of anything but for some reason under Snow Leopard these permissions were stuffed up. Thanks to the anonymous person who had worked this out.

That's the good over with. I've also had further improvement by doubling the RAM on my laptop. Even though Snow Leopard has a smaller disk footprint than Leopard (well done Apple) it appears to need more RAM. What had been a marginal but OK setup under 10.5.8 refused to run with any stability in Snow Leopard. That and 10.6.1 seem to have fixed a couple of the stability problems I was suffering.

Now the ugly. The very ugly actually. The Mail app is totally stuffed under Snow Leopard for me and a lot of others. There is a vast sea of questions and complaints on the Apple support forums. The main problem is that Mail downloads multiple copies of the same email. It appeared to be mainly POP accounts but unfortunately IMAP accounts are similarly affected. My first alert to this was when I came home one afternoon to find tens of thousands of emails in my inbox and my monthly data allowance totally blown. Because I need web access to my mail from time to time, I keep a copy on the server. This has been working OK with the Mail app for years. I've got around 7,500 emails in one account and it worked perfectly.

Not under Snow Leopard. Mail now downloads copy after copy. I had thought that IMAP solved the problem but I came downstairs this morning to find my laptop in the middle of downloading 13,500 new emails. None of course were new.

I've done the whole bit, deleted accounts and created them again from scratch. Created new IMAP accounts, removed the POP accounts...on and on and on. I'm amongst friends though, many people are getting increasingly angry about this and about Apple's total lack of public response. Are you alive Apple, do you care about your users?

It's now almost a month since I upgraded and I haven't had working email for most of that time. I'm relying on my iPhone which is great for a two line response but hopeless for a detailed email.

Apple: you only have to get two things right - the browser and the mail app. We can live with anything else. All you have to do is fix Mail NOW and sit around a table with Adobe and fix the Flash plugin for Safari and our lives will return to near normal.

Apple Snow Leopard - The Problem Child

If you visit the Apple support forums you'll find three sorts of people: the first lot have problems with their upgrade to Snow Leopard - the latest version of Mac OS X; the second lot are metaphorically shouting at the first saying "there's nothing wrong with Snow Leopard it's you"; the third lot are making genuine, and sometimes successful, attempts to help the first lot.

From my point of view Snow Leopard is a great leap forward that is threatening to be a PR disaster for Apple. Many of us, with faith in Apple, upgraded early. Apple was very keen to get us to upgrade and has been shouting Snow Leopard from the roof tops for weeks. Being nice and sensible I pored over the various lists of incompatible software and where I couldn't find an answer I contacted the manufacturer. Having decided that all my key software was compatible I then did a big spring clean of the Macs. Finally I set forth and upgraded one Mac and used it for a while. All seemed well and so I did the rest.

BAD MOVE!!

1. Various applications began crashing randomly. The vast majority of these were Apple apps that were updated with Snow Leopard. Things like Safari, Mail, iPhoto, and despite Microsoft's protestations that it was ready - Office apps crash too;
2. Various bits of software for no apparent reason begin to hog CPU cycles. This in turn creates load on the CPU which begins to heat up and then the fan speeds up to keep things cool. Meanwhile whatever is hogging cycles just keeps hogging until you kill the process. What's that about? The worst is Safari and the Flash plug in Safari but there are others too. Your Mac sounds like a jet taking off;
3. Printers cease to function. I had a perfectly good printer connected by ethernet to my Airport and it had been working with no problems for months on the various iterations of 10.5. The upgrade to 10.6 has killed things stone dead. Despite two full days of working through a vast range of possible solutions NOTHING works and nothing prints. Even though there isn't a specific driver for this printer - a GCC - in 10.6 it should still work using a generic driver. Well it doesn't and it isn't even visible on the network. I can't even ping the fucking thing;

I won't bore you with all the other minutiae that are causing me grief - including the broken iSync Bluetooth process. I've zapped PRAM, fixed permissions, re-installed Snow Leopard, doubled the RAM in my system, blitzed caches...and nothing helps.

I've come to the view finally that this was a cynical piece of marketing by Apple. They rushed Snow Leopard out the door early so that they beat Microsoft who are releasing Windows 7 in october apparently.

Well all that's done is leave a whole bunch of us out in the cold with Snow Leopard and freezing our tits off.

Apple the least you can do is get your arses into gear and start releasing updates to fix some of the issues. Snow Leopard and your other apps need some fixes, why don't you fix them?

In the meantime if you haven't already updated to Snow Leopard then my advice is don't be stupid like me: wait for a couple of updates before you do.