Last week GoToMac.com reported that Steve Jobs held an "All hands" communication meeting with Apple staff in the Town Hall on the Apple campus and Webcast to company employees around the globe.

The report, apparently from notes taken by someone in attendance, noted that a lot of the meeting was about customers: "We have not loved our customers enough, we'll start loving them again." (unattributed, but presumably Mr. Jobs). and evangelism.

It was affirmed that over the past few years Apple has put all its love in to designing the hardware, and not enough love was given to the customer... "that is going to change." It was also noted that the company is now "listening to customer feedback very closely."

The article said Apple is asking for volunteers, specifically company employees who can go to retailers to evangelize the Mac and help the sales process.

Well, they have finally admitted it. I hope they mean what they say about change.

Let's recap. Apple has had a reputation for arrogance when it's riding high, interspersed with occasional lapses of humility when things are not so flush. In other words, adversity tends to bring out the best behavior in Apple Corp., and good times its most boorish.

During Apple's last and worst rough patch, the nadir being reached on the cusp of 1996-97, Apple became positively solicitous of its customer base, with initiatives like hiring the personable Guy Kawasaki has its official "Chief Evangelist," with an eponimously named e-mail list. In those days you at least had the impression that Apple appreciated your business.

Unfortunately, with the return of Steve Jobs in '97, and the subsequent upswing in Apple's corporate fortunes, customer relations got shoved way down the list of priorities again. Kawasaki left, the Evangelist was cut adrift, and the company began implementing arguably the most customer-unfriendly policies in its history.

Of course, while market share was climbing, stock values soaring, and Apple's products becoming the toast of pop-culture, many people found it easy to forgive Apple's increasingly take-it-or-leave-it attitude.

I did not, recognizing that the roll Apple was on was built on a narrow and fragile set of probably unreproducible circumstances, and that the company was not only failing to build on its true underlying strength -- the enthusiasm and loyalty of the core Mac OS user base -- it seemed to actually be going out of its way to alienate and antagonize some of the Mac platform's best friends.

Whenever I wrote about these misgivings, usually when provoked by yet another instance of Apple slapping its friends in the face, I would get e-mail admonishing me that Apple was just another computer company that had to operate on "sound business principles," and shouldn't be expected to hold its customers' hands or be grateful for their loyalty.

To which I reply: hogwash. For one thing, the most fundamental sound business principle of sustainably successful companies is: the customer always comes first. For another, if Apple was just another computer company, it would be building dull Windows PCs, and probably doing very well on a much more consistent basis than it has historically done as a vertically integrated builder and sole purveyor (save for the eyeblink clone era) of an alternate, niche market, computer platform.

It is foolish to think that Apple can operate under the same set of business assumptions that govern say, Compaq, Dell, or Gateway. For one thing, as an alternative ("non compatible" in PC think) platform, Apple is always pitching from behind in the sense of needing to convince prospective customers why they shouldn't run with the herd, which most people are temperamentally inclined to do, and likewise persuading present customers to stay with the Mac.

For the past two years, Apple has been living off the pop-cultural coolness factor of the iMac and iBook, but the essence of pop-culture popularity is it's fickleness, and that it is always looking for the next big thing. The Cube was calculated to be the next big thing, but Apple's miscalculated badly by launching it priced as an office object d'art for yuppies, rather than a populist consumer product. There are indications at Apple has belatedly recognized its error, but it remains to be seen whether the Cube can recover from its Edsel image in public perception (the Edsel was a perfectly good car, and something of a design tour-de-force like the Cube, but that didn't help it ultimately), as well as the stigma of being the match that lit the fire of Apple's stock price meltdown.

I digress. Getting back to my point about pitching from behind, because of all the convincing and persuading the needs to be done, forever and ever, world without end, the value of the personal evangelism engaged in by Mac enthusiasts is priceless. Apple recognized this obvious reality back in the mid 90's, and proactively tapped into it. Unfortunately, once the balance sheets started registering black values again on a consistent basis, Apple's arrogance reasserted itself and the company started pissing away a lot of the good will that had been laboriously accumulated, but which can evaporate overnight unless nurtured and cultivated.

It pains me to think how much more ground might have been gained through 1998, '99, and the first half of this year, had Apple chosen to esteem and treat the loyal Mac user base as valued partners and allies, rather than ignoring them and taking them for granted.

Another, related major error that the Apple of Jobs has made is in eroding and alienating its network of local dealers. Of course, independent dealers can be so annoyingly, well, independent, and it's easy to see how they don't fit neatly into Steve Jobs' command-and-control vision of the way things should work.

And it is also true that some dealers have been exploitative of rip-off artists who padded warranty claims, and used Apple's name recognition mainly as a tool to lure customers into the store where they could be fed a sales pitch for PC boxes.

However, not all dealers were/are like this. Many believe in, and tirelessly promote the Mac platform, despite the frustrations and inherent insecurity of being in a business relationship with Apple, which generally treats its business partners with contempt.

A particularly egregious consequence of cutting back on local dealer presence is the loss or diminishment of access to local repair options. For PowerBooks and iBooks this is extreme, as dealers are not able to buy parts from Apple and are not authorized to perform most warranty repairs -- for which the Apple laptops must be shipped to Apple's centralized laptop repair facility in Texas (a policy on laptop service that is not limited to Apple, unfortunately).

This policy is idiotic. PowerBooks, particularly, tend to be owned by people who use them for serious, day to day work, and can ill afford to lose the use of their computer for up to 10 days, especially when the problem is something relatively trivial that could be easily, quickly, and efficiently dealt with in a dealer's service department, that is, you are fortunate enough to still have a local Apple dealer. Here in the province of Nova Scotia, where I live, there are just two full-service authorized Apple dealers left, the nearest one to me being 150 mi. away.

For reasons I outlined earlier in this article, I do not believe that a niche market player like Apple can thrive and grow focusing mainly on centralized, mail order sales. While that has been a successful formula for Dell, it must also be noted that Dell is in the PC business, offers superb after sales support with a three-year warranty, and one year (three years on some in spur on notebooks) on-site service, which guarantees that a Dell technician will arrive at your location by the next business day. Sure beats sending your laptop to Texas for warranty repairs.

Apple has much room for improvement in these areas.

So, now that Apple [reportedly] says it loves us again, it will be interesting to see how that plays out in practical terms.

What I would prefer to see would be the good people at Apple focusing some of their creative energies on ways to cooperatively work with the Mac enthusiast community in the most effective and productive manner for advancing and Mac platform. I can't see how doing this wouldn't be a win-win dynamic for all parties concerned.

After all, Mac aficionados aren't looking for handouts, or even thanks for their evangelism efforts -- much less love. However, a bit of acknowledgment and respect would be nice.

Charles W. Moore

.