[Loose Cannons] Misfire Awards - Special Apple Dedication!

Thanks for all the response to last week's Misfires!

As we expected, you sputtered and spewed venom, bricks and bouquets all over us for our choices. As a matter of fact, next week will be dedicated to *your* misfires! Send your submissions and reasons why they deserve to be singled out to cannons@applelinks.com.

But this week, it's all dedicated to Apple. The company we love....to hate.

How can a company, one that makes some of the most well-designed and well conceived products in the computer industry, have so much trouble with the little things?

Apple has so many miscues, we had to rework the awards late in the game to include some of the most recent missteps out of Cupertino. Case in point - the Award for "They Should Have Known Better" goes to whoever it was at Apple Legal who approved the original wording of Apple's iTools Terms of Service. The short version of the original ToS was "Whatever you put in your iDisk, we own."

What were they thinking? They had to have heard about the exact same Dumb Ass move pulled by Yahoo/GeoCities back in June. And, if they hadn't heard about it, they should be fired for being ostriches.

Speaking of iTools, has anyone checked out iReview? It wins our award for "All Sizzle, No Steak." The last News Site reviewed was January 12th, the last review of a Movie Site was Feb 1st, Finance - January 28th and the last Computer Site reviewed was more than a week and a half ago.

Ironically, it was CNET, undoubtedly one of the worse sites on the Net for Macintosh News. There were 4 Mac sites reviewed and 3 of them belong to Mac Publishing. What is Apple sucking up to them for?

In the category of "Where's Q&A;? Looking at T&A;?", we thought things were bad last year with the "Blue Blocker Scandal." But it got worse when Apple released QuickTime 4.1 and Mac OS 9 Audio Update 1.2. MacFixit (among others) reported numerable problems with both. In the case of the Audio Update, Apple almost immediately pulled it in favor of 1.3. This is software that should never have been posted and the Macintosh User Community deserves an apology from Apple for the distress and hassles it has caused.

In the "Talk to the Hand" category, Apple's Public Relations Department gets all the props. A tighter, more anal retentive organization you couldn't imagine. With some of the folks over there and at Edelman (Apple's PR Agency), if you stuck a piece of coal into their mouths, a week later, you'd get a diamond.

If you work for a news organization, it takes a Herculean effort in order to speak to anyone at Apple. While Apple has understandably clamped down on employees speaking to the media, even if you have legitimate business with Apple, the rank and file are afraid to speak without the imprimaturs of "Rhona and the Gang."

By the time you go through the three month process of calling every day, leaving messages that get ignored for weeks on end, the piece of news you wanted to talk about is no longer of interest to your readers.

And Apple wonders why there is so much interest in rumors? Maybe it's because Apple won't let the media gather information legitimately.

While we could, unfortunately, go on and on about Apple's missteps, we'll wrap this issue of The Misfire Awards with this most recent tidbit in the category of "Oops....Were We Supposed to do That?"

We all know that Apple announced, for the first time in many years, new products outside of the big US shows. Jobs announced some hot new Powerbooks, faster G4's and a new iBook in Graphite. Did you happen to catch the QT Stream? No? How about the ZDNet RealAudio version? No?

Of course you didn't. MacOS Rumors early on Tuesday (story since pulled) said it was due to Apple sources saying it wasn't cost effective to WebCast Jobs' Keynote.

After the Cannons got through laughing our asses off, we checked our own sources, one of whom lives just outside of Tokyo. Turns out, Apple Japan is about as effective as Barney Fife after three double espressos. Apple Japan simply hadn't made the arrangements in time.

How much you want to bet that by the end of the month, a honcho out of Apple Japan is out of Apple Japan?

Next week, the Readers' Choice for our Misfire Awards! Send in your submissions!

Until next time, Loose Cannons Out!

cannons@applelinks.com

May 16, 2012