Why is Apple trying so hard to impersonate BP?

(To increase the font – hold down the Ctrl key and keep pressing +) When it comes to managing crisis –  history definitely rhymes.

The plot goes something like this: a well-heeled company suddenly finds itself embroiled in a crisis. As word spreads, the problem threatens to take center stage. Yet the firm continues to insist all is well – we have everything under control, they say – it’s just a minor glitch -we will get it sorted out in a jiffy. Naturally, the problem gets bigger and there’s still no solution in sight.

By this stage the media has already picked up the scent – the firm retreats back into its corporate bunker issuing out reams of denials like Hitler in the final days of the Reich / at one point it even attempts to silence critics (by shutting dow a few sites, one of them a gaming forum! Are you fucking crazy!) and even threatening to sue them – when that fails the firm starts to accuse it’s critics of spewing malicious fatwah, disinformation and lies.

If the scene I have just recounted sounds startling similar to what transpired recently in BP in the early days following the Deepwater Horizon crisis – it’s also the same anatomy of disaster that we all saw with Toyota and their dodgy brakes that have a mind of their own – now it’s played out again in the latest comical saga of the iPhone 4’s  nutty antenna  – it’s so screwy, that Apple have even begun issuing out cue cards as to how users should hold their cell phone – a first in mobile phone history. Not even Alexander Graham Bell did that. This is unbelievable – a firm selling you a phone and then telling you how you and I should grip a phone. As if the only thing we have been doing for the last 10 years is talking to each other using smoke signals – I mean to me, if you buy a phone, it should work whether you are talking upside down like a Bat. Or gripping it with your feet like an Orang Utan (which I regularly do whenever I am getting my nails manicured).

And here comes the hat trick – what’s Apple’s solution? A $20 plastic skin, that to me sounds dumber than dumb – I mean, think about it, if buy a high end luxury car and every time you turn the ignition on and black smoke starts spewing out of the air-con vents like one of those shower heads in those Nazi deathcamps – how would you feel if the dealer proposes to solve the problem by issuing you with a $20 rubber gas mask?

Why not just fix the lousy antenna problem and reissue new phones? After BP and now this – I really don’t know what else to expect from the 7 habits of highly ineffective firms. But one thing is for sure, this definitely takes the cake!

Wonder no more why I recommended a hard sell 2 months ago – like I said, I never ever trust a firm when it’s run ONLY by one man – never. It’s no bloody good! Now you know why. Track her as she goes right down in the next few trading sessions. I may just decide to pick her up again just for a spot of drive by selling – that’s all she’s good for.

Darkness 2010

“Help us! They have shut us down for no reason. All we were doing was spoofing the iPhone. Is there someone out there who we can tell all this too?”

“I know a group of people.”

A conversation captured by an auto-bot crawler in the thread known as “The Californian,” – The Brotherhood 2010