Sparkplug 9 >> bizhack

Sparkplug 9 >> bizhack:

Email lists and forums are for existing clients with technical problems. You’re forgetting people who have not yet exchanged money in their pockets with products on your shelves.

What about the people who want to enlist? What about the people who want to get on the bus? What about the people who want to stop and have a coffee? What about the people who want to join a community? What about the people who want to stop for a minute at the water cooler?

Attitudes like this …

And THAT is why Apple has no blogging policy. Because, frankly, it’d just get in the way of what is already going on: working with and communicating with Apple’s customers.

… are insular. Inward-focused. Limited and limiting.

Some interesting comments here critical of what I said. Go read them — very interesting.

But, I think it misses one point.

If you look at Apple’s current strategy, IT’S WORKING. Very well, from units shipped, market share growth, revenue. The lack of blogs don’t seem to be hurting Apple.

And in actuality, John DOES get it, without realizing it. He opened his comments with:

If you want to tell somebody something, you have to speak their language. And it helps to be in the same room.

And that’s exactly what Apple IS doing. While Mac OS X and Macs are increasingly being adopted by the geek community, Apple’s primary audience isn’t geekland — it’s the consumer product market. And that is why Apple is doing TV ads and billboards and mass marketing and not blogs. Because that’s where its customers ARE.

People within the tech community tend to start thinking that the entire universe is and thinks like them. It’s not.

And the reality is, Apple IS in the same room with its customers. That the hard core geek community isn’t the primary focus of that attention bothers some of the hard-core geeks, but it doesn’t make what they’re doing wrong. Just look at the numbers.

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