The year Apple lost its mojo

For me 2010 will be the year when Apple lost its mojo. We are only in march but in the space of two months Apple managed to change my feelings of  respect for one of the coolest tech companies to something close to the feelings I have for the likes of SCO. Don't get me wrong, Apple always was a company that was difficult to do business with, but until now its customers where its first priority. Now however Apple has turned against its customers and is destroying its brand.

Back then when Apple had its mojo.

If you looked at Apple a few years ago you would see one of the coolest technology corporations around. It's iPod line of music players was not only cool, but its iTunes software was a breeding ground for media innovation. It practically invented podcasts, allowing anybody to distributes its ideas and culture around in audio or video format. Steve Jobs was pushing the music labels to offer DRM-free songs. The OSX operating system build on BSD was considered the best customer OS, placing robustness, user comfort and usability above almost everything else. It was so good that some serious Linux geeks started using Macs. It is the company that scrapped the wildly successful iPod mini to innovate by releasing the iPod Nano. Apple was just plain cool for geeks as well as the man on the street.

Forward to 2010

Let's contrast this with the situation this year. For new year I purchased a brand new iPod touch, as I considered that the application ecosystem was finally mature. My primary interest was to read eBooks with the excellent Stanza reader, and also to play the games available in the app store. One of the main factors that pushed me toward the iPod was that a large number of adult themed games and applications had finally been accepted in the app store, something that in my opinion took much too long to happen. The fact that the iPod touch could also replace my old mp3 player was a bonus. Everything looked peachy at first, however this would not last long.

Problems starts

The initial setup of the iPod touch went flawlessly thanks to iTunes, but things quickly started to go wrong. First after the installation of Stanza I realized that I could not load my collection of unprotected ePub books purchased from Websciptions through my USB connection. This was possible before, but apparently Apple removed this much needed functionality. There was well a workaround that involved setting up a web server on my computer and downloading my books over my Wifi network. The thing is so involved for an end user that I have yet to do it. Since I choose an Apple product because they were easy to use I can say is that it is a major let down. Then one day most of the sexy games and apps that were such a big part of the iPod Touch attractiveness started to disappear from the app store. Despite contacting Apple to fix this it is still impossible for me to get that kind of content anymore. In the end I gave up, gave my iPod touch to my wife and purchased and Android phone (I needed a new phone anyway). Then a few day later I learned that Apple has started to play the patent troll with my new phone's manufacturer (HTC) to try to stop it from selling its Android devices, forcing me to use their own non-working products! Now as an Apple customer, how do you thing I feel. If you said "You'll never buy anything from Apple again" you nailed it, that exactly how I feel.

Turning against its customers

As I said, Apple has always been a company that was hard to do business with, but up until now they always protected their customers. What has changed is that now Apple is not only hurting their partners, but also their customers. One of the reasons that Microsoft windows is so bloated and insecure but still popular is that Microsoft has learned that once a feature of your products is used, you pretty much can't remove it unless you provide a better alternative. Whether you intended to provide the feature or third party developers created it as an "hack" is pretty much irrelevant: once your customers have started to rely on it, you pretty much have to keep it, or announce an "end of life" years in the future to give your customers the time to find alternative solution. Apple stopped doing this, choosing instead to leave the people who paid for their product out in the cold. This is not the behavior of a respectable technology company.

Not able to innovate anymore

If you look at Apple one thing is clear: they have not released anything new since the iPod touch / iPhone release. The only "new features" we have seen on these devices since their were released were things that should have been there from the start such as copy paste and a decent battery life or brought by third parties such as the Stanza reader. Look at the iPad: it is far from revolutionary: a big overpriced iPod touch! A $499 iPad cost little more than $200 to build, and there are many competitors such as Archos that have similar offerings for $200 to $400. What has Apple to show to justify the huge price premium? Very little as the iPad will be more limited than it competitors: it won't have sexy games, it won't have flash, and I bet it won't be easy to load your existing eBooks on it. What this looks like is a product from a company that is unable to innovate, wants to milk its customers dry for old technology and hopes to retain its user base by preventing other to innovate thanks to its patten portfolio. This is not far from the story of another company called SCO, and we all know how that story finished.

Lets hope Apple can get back on the right path before it is too late.