Infinite Loop / The Apple Ecosystem

Why can’t Apple blog?

A former employee thinks Apple employees do blog, but influential bloggers …

The recent publicity centering around the "masked blogger" at Apple Computer has brought up the question of informal communication between the secretive corporation and the public. Chuqui , a former Apple employee, contends that blogging is not the issue.

IT AIN'T ABOUT BLOGGING. It's about communication. it's about sharing information. It's about solving problems. And while Scoble loves to babble about blogs (because he is, ultimately, a blogger, not a communicator), Apple employees have been out there working with the customer base.

Chuqui suggests that Apple employees communicate directly with users through mailing lists and discussion forums, often anonymously. Why anonymously, and why not in a less obscure manner, like a blog?

Why should they? putting an apple on their breast simply makes them a target to every anti-mac pc-bigot or customer with a problem looking for someone to solve it for them. These folks don't WANT that sort of fun.

Yeah, those quotes are contradictory, but then I could just be another anti-whatever jerk giving a former Apple employee a hard time by quoting out of context. Or Chuqui could be writing a treatise on side-stepping the issue.

Honestly, does anyone really believe that Apple employees do not have another reason to be very careful about typing those five letters anywhere in conjunction with their name, besides hate mail from jerks on the Internet? If so, this anecdote from Dave Winer about Kate Adams should be enlightening.

Kate was at a company-wide meeting in Cupertino, shortly after Jobs took over, and sent me an email for publication without attribution, enthusiastically explaning what Steve had said. I published the email on Scripting News, without identifying the source. The next day she was called into Steve Jobs's office at Apple, they knew who sent the email because they had written a script watching for mail going to me from inside Apple.

This is not to say that "frowning" upon employees who conduct informal communication with the public is a bad policy. Secrecy has worked well for Apple Computer in bringing products to market, and that is what the vast majority of customers want, myself included. However, let's not delude ourselves about whether that communication exists in any real fashion. The counter to that fantasy is stated obviously by Robert Scoble.

Anyway, you can see the difference in how Apple treats online communication in Chuqui’s post. At Adobe I see tons of blogs. At Microsoft I see tons of blogs. At IBM I see tons of blogs. At Sun I see tons of blogs.

With the exception of Surfin' Safari, the closest thing to public discourse by Apple employees would be this guy.

Like it or not, that's the reality of the situation.

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