I’m going on a phone hunt.

I’m going to catch an iPhone.

It costs almost £1000!

I’m not scared.*

In truth, I am scared because I have never bought a Steve Jobs product directly, except things like the movie Toy Story. That doesn’t count because I think it is true to say that Pixar got successful when Jobs was looking the other way trying to recreate Apple at NeXT and only partly succeeding. iTunes is free, so that does not count either, and I would have bought the two album downloads and two individual tracks anyway.

My current MP3 player is in my Windows smartphone, so unfortunately I have to be geeky enough to figure out Media Player and its odd syncing protocol. I am, for now, an iPod-free zone.

For a long time I operated what you might call a “Best Nokia Heuristic”, i.e. just buying the best phone that Nokia makes. This was a business decision that started when I bought the earliest GSM phones to equip my team of reporters at Opec meetings (there goes another Opec reference, folks!).

It had been preceded by another heuristic — the “It Must Work in a Lift Heuristic”. Only Nokias did at that time. Eccentrically, I would also test them by descending into the basement area of the Espree Health Club behind Fleet Street. The staff at Charles Dunstone’s Carphone Warehouse, still in the early days of its emerging success story, was always very obliging with demo product. This particular rule of thumb derived from a most extraordinary moment Continue reading ‘i’m going on a phone hunt’

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Much has been made of the out-of-character decision of Apple to attack its own fan base among the alternative tech universe by suing a blogger www.thinksecret.com who seems routinely to have been spilling the beans on Apple’s product announcements. In the FT article, legal opinion indicated Apple did not have much of a chance. That sounds about right. However, the assumption seems to be the computer anti-hero’s anti-hero has lost its collective marbles and turned on one of its own, threatening to damage its reputation and core franchise in the creative and alternative computer user space.

This is taking things a little far. Apple, like any corporation, has a job to do to maintain the confidentiality of its products prior to their launch. Waging the PR war is all part of branding and creating competitive advantage, and the more your competitors know about what you are doing and when you are going to do it, the easier it is for their publicity machinery to make some hay.

With this story, it is a significant acknowledgement of the threat of the uncontrolled blogosphere. There is no reason why even Apple, which commands so much sentimental support among the whacky, should not be concerned about how this medium and the attached behaviour evolves. It is impossible to control entirely, but it seems that many companies in future may have to fight some lonely battles against the crudest weapons of the smallest operators just to protect their reputations.

Indicating that there may be large legal costs associated with indiscriminate blogging is a necessary reminder to these new publishers that actions may have consequences, even if in this case the defendant is getting free legal help and looks likely to win. Other bloggers with no limits on their liability and shallow pockets might lose the shirts off their backs faced with the threat of legal action.

Therefore, Apple may sensibly be sending a signal to these potentially “errant children” that there may be reprisals for misbehaviour. In all walks of life, the internet has created new risks without any accompany sense of the liabilities of freely communicating. In the US, the classic way to communicate even sometimes with customers and business partners is through litigation. It should not be taken personally.

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