Apple's March To Evil

Apple has been an admired company for years now. They seem to be in the news constantly with this release and that upgrade. Has this been a good year for Apple. I think not.

Lately, they sure don't seem to care what image they are projecting. They could use a little PR help, as they are looking rather evil. Here is the year's highlights which Apple would rather we forgot, and their progression towards an evil company.

Deceit
First, there was lots of mystery concerning Steve Job's health. Apple announced his dramatic weight loss was due to a hormone imbalance. Later, he announced a sudden leave of absence, with no reason why. Later it was announced as a very serious transplant. Finally, Apple claimed he returned to work, but there was a mysterious lack of pictures of him until TMZ got this photo. Another, incidence of deceit came later when iPhone's voicemail was down for 2 weeks, and neither Apple nor AT&T bothered to tell their customers.

Pride
Apple celebrated their newest innovation, copy and paste. This was, of course, a 35-year-old idea. They also released an update to their desktop line with surprisingly little updates.

Greed
We also heard about Apple being late in paying developers who published apps through the iPhone store. This smells of the kind of greed evil companies soon develop. Reminds me of some Walmart stories I've heard.

Bully
Apple further said thank-you to their iPhone SDK developers by forcing iPhone 3.0 compliance on them. Of course the 3.0 SDK was not compatible with the 2.0 SDK. This was viewed as a move to sell more 3.0 iPhones (see Greedy, above).

Anticompetitive
Apple recently rejected the Google Voice iPhone app, which competes with services offered by AT&T, their iPhone partner. Sources are blaming AT&T, but AT&T is blaming Apple.

Stupid
In a final move, Apple is now making the claim that jailbreaking an iPhone is a threat to national security. They propose making jailbreaking the iPhone illegal, rather than improve cell tower security. This move, if successful will cement Apple's place in the Evil Corp hall of fame and prove that evil begets stupid.

My advice to Apple: You are a great company, and have had a tremendous run of success. But you don't know what your best asset is. Its not the iPhone, nor the Mac. Its your loyal fans. You are destroying what you built. Stop now. Start anew. Respect your customers, especially your app developers. And spread the iPhone to other carriers already.