Monday February 28, 2011 – Stewart Wolpin
For years, Microsoft was the company everyone loved to hate, the big bully monopolist that controlled every aspect of our desktop, whose founder is one of the world's richest people. What an easy target for our enmity. A veritable parlor game sprung up picturing Bill Gates twirling a handlebar mustache and chortling diabolically like a geeky Snidely Whiplash.
But Bill Gates is in the midst of a John D. Rockefeller-like make-over from plotting tycoon to beloved philanthropist, his company's grip on the PC desktop has been loosened by several court rulings and Google, and its relevance in the red-hot smartphone market has lagged. This has actually recast the company as an underdog.
Nature abhors a vacuum. If we can't hate Microsoft anymore, where can we now aim our thoughtless enmity?
Apparently Apple has been nominated. Increasingly, the Cupertino giant, now the world's most valuable tech company, is being labeled the Big Brother its 1984 Super Bowl commercial attacked, with many in the media gleefully marking the irony to the point of cliché.
Yes, the press has taken potshots at Apple before, but usually with good reason, such as its heavy-handed reaction to its stolen iPhone 4 prototype, iPhone 4 antennagate, and its non-LTE Verizon iPhone 4. But more recent reporting smacks of knee-jerk, pitchforks and torches fetching mentality, a vitriol usually reserved for true trust-shattering types such as BP, Richard Nixon and Barry Bonds.
Greedy Apple?
Clues to the media's attitude shift toward Apple come from reports about the "disappointing" sales of the Verizon iPhone, reports that then went viral without additional checking by normally more circumspect publications. First, of course, no one really knows what the "expectations" were and the initial reports were denied (yes, maybe the lines at Verizon were shorter – but what other new smartphone release results in lines of any kind?). But reports on iPhone 4's "disappointing" sales and shorter lines may be a result of Apple's history of hype.
More indicative, perhaps, was the reporting on last week's two seemingly connected (at least by less discerning eyes) but in actuality disparate iPhone/iPad app e-commerce policy events.
First came Apple's rejection of the Sony Reader ebook app resulting from Sony selling content from within the app. The rejection was followed by much aggrieved huffing-and-puffing threats to withdraw from iTunes by Sony (a threat itself subsequently withdrawn).
A few days later, Apple announced its content app subscription policy, which included language describing Apple's usual 30 percent cut.
In each case, Apple correctly applied its well-defined policies, which have not varied either in degree or enforcement.
Yet many in the media, including reporters and publications who should have known better, jumped to some ridiculous conclusions. They somehow merged the two events, then postulated these "new" or "newly-enforced" policies defined a new greed by Apple that would force many apps providers such as Kindle or Netflix out of iTunes. The 24/7 and easy viral nature of “web news” is alive and well in all sectors but Apple’s bullseye tattooed on its back makes it particularly susceptible to high volumes of this treatment. (You can read my more detailed report on the media's mis-reporting on these policies here.)
Big Bad Apple
What happened? Everything, it seems. Once on the verge of bankruptcy a decade ago, Apple has grown to become one of only two companies in the world valued at more than $300 billion. The other is the even more despised Exxon-Mobile. Apple dominates either true market or perceived mind share (or both) in music retailing, online movie downloading, smartphones, smartphone apps, tablet PCs and digital music players.
It's true. Apple has become the monolith it once successfully marketed against, but it’s odd that this riches-to-rags-to-riches roller coaster Apple has been on is reviled rather than viewed as a success story.
And it's not that Apple is being newly perceived as "evil" in the same way Microsoft was. Microsoft's domination had a bitter after-taste; we were resigned to tolerate its clunky yet inescapable desktop ubiquity. Our relationship with Apple is more voluntarily masochistic – we have chosen to be dominated by a velvet dictator.
