APPLE IS ALREADY ROTTING I didn’t want to stick my neck out last month and say t

APPLE IS ALREADY ROTTING

I didn’t want to stick my neck out last month and say that Apple’s brand is decaying. I thought the Steve Jobs worship was overdone. But, just as kings and queens tend to keep a populace holding positive sentiments, so does a heroic and visionary leader. Apple isn’t actually a very nice company. It pushes ethics to the limit and often beyond. When we saw the company anthropomorphized as a heroic Steve Jobs trying to fight for us by creating simple interfaces against the careless and mechanistic IBM/WIN-TEL behemoths, we forgave Apple its indiscretions. But if you follow the sentiments expressed online by pundits and average consumers it’s clear that they still want their iphones and ipads and macbooks. But it’s also clear that company that we see as Apple, is attracting negative sentiments rapidly. It’s a magnet for criticism.

I’ve been toying with how to create a replacement identity for Apple – a persona that isn’t so much of a replacement for Jobs, but at least would allow the public human image that they believed was still fighting for them on their behalf. Anything I’d find attractive would be too obscure. Someone else might have more populist instincts. I’ve always felt that TMobile selected good representatives. Geico does a good job as well. But Apple needs something special. A person that they can trust – and I don’t see that person on the management team at apple. So it’s got to be an actor capable of engendering nerdy-artist consumer trust. I do NOT think creating a set of identities will work. Or that a populist brand will work.

There are better people than I working on it. I’m more interested in simply recording that the problem exists and that it needs to be solved.