“With the political super-season gearing up, come accusations of ‘whisper campaigns,’ or the spreading of false, damaging rumors from unknown sources. Based on a casual comment from an acquaintance, Apple might be under the same type of attack,” David Morgenstern blogs for ZDNet.
“The other day, I happened to be talking to an executive at a technology company who fits this profile. He’s never owned a Mac and for all that I know, never even used one. He may not use an iPod! His company doesn’t support Apple hardware and never will. He bleeds Windows. He knows about my Mac connection and in the course of our conversation, I mentioned that I had seen the new MacBook Air and how impressed I was with it,” Morgenstern writes. “He then asked me about something he had heard about Apple. The gist was that while Apple products had great design, they were of poor quality. In other words, Apple makes products that look good, but break easily or don’t hold their value.”
Morgenstern writes, “This was a very strange comment, so odd that it took me aback for a moment. Mac owners know, as well as those who have considered purchasing a Mac, that Apple has a topnotch reputation for industrial design and reliability. Consumer Reports and other media outlets mention this fact on a yearly basis.”
MacDailyNews Note: Please see related articles:
ChangeWave: Apple’s iPhone races to huge lead in customer satisfaction – October 18, 2007
Apple Mac desktops, notebooks top PC Magazine’s Annual Reader Satisfaction survey – again – September 18, 2007
Survey: Apple iPhone nabs unprecedented 92% satisfaction rating (plus likes and dislikes) – August 16, 2007
Apple again tops the field in LAPTOP Magazine’s ‘Tech Support Showdown 2007’ – June 19, 2007
Apple again leads Consumer Reports’ survey for notebook, desktop computer tech support, value, more – October 16, 2006
Apple Mac desktops, notebooks top PC Magazine’s Annual Reader Satisfaction survey – again – August 22, 2006
Apple far outscores all other PC makers in Consumer Reports Computer Tech Support Survey – May 05, 2006
Apple Mac desktops, portables top PC Magazine’s 2005 Reader Satisfaction survey – August 24, 2005
Apple Computer products top PC Magazine’s annual ‘Best of the Year’ survey – December 16, 2004
Apple Macs top PC Magazine’s ’17th Annual Reader Satisfaction Survey’ – August 10, 2004
Apple leads PC Magazine’s 16th annual Service and Reliability Survey – July 10, 2003
Morgenstern continues, “This isn’t to say that Apple doesn’t have its design problems and QA mishaps, such as flaming notebooks, defective hardware and poor production runs. Or problem software releases. Yet, while customers have screamed at times, for the most part, the company’s been able to overcome QA issues.”
“So, where did this notion of Apple’s lack of quality come from. My buddy said he “heard” from someone. He didn’t make it up,” Morgenstern continues. “Being so false, it has the ring of a rumor campaign to me. The best candidate to receive the rumor would be someone who hasn’t used a Mac client machine. I can see how it may spread in in enterprise IT departments or within companies receiving pitches for technology adoptions where switchers are starting to be seen.”
More in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “R” for the heads up.]
Actually this is not a myth. I’ve been in the IT industry for more then 20 years. I’ve been the IT purchasing person many times. Know you call Dell. You order PC desktops for the masses of unwashed employees and then you oder the higher ups or the marketing department the required Macs.
The Dell employee will always say the same thing if you even mention that you need to order a Mac, it’s like it’s scripted by Dell, “You know the Macs look nice but, there just junk in a pretty package.”. The first few times I ignored it, then I started baiting them and it’s always about the same line. I’ve returned 99% more Dell systems for repair then I have Mac systems over the years.
Not that anyone knows it yet but the company is using WordPress for internal blogging and it runs on an old core duo MacMini.
If the CEO know now many of the company servers are Macs now he’d crap. I’ll I every hear is great job the department heads all report that they’ve had 99.5% availability on their servers. All I ever thinks crap if I could just figure out how to replace the last of the Windows Servers with Macs it would be 100% up time.
Let the whisper campaign continue. If people were to be that stupid to believe a mac is poorly designed, they’re too stupid to own a mac to begin with…
… and if anything else, these will be the people that whinge on how much better windows XP is during their consultation with apple’s tech support. Wasting everyone elses time, especially those that paid applecare and with a genuine technical problem.
“AAPL price never again suffers some 30%+ drop in value.”
This isn’t the first…
http://www.appleturns.com/
“Apple has its best quarter and year in the history of the company– so of course its stock tanks.”
And won’t be the last
Zune Tang®
Hey are you getting ready to switch to becoming a Mac-loyalist? It sounds as if you want to screw Apple supporters instead of just Dell users. Truth be told you really are impotent.
Good job, ron! Since you cleverly brought politics into the discussion it reminded me of another great point.
One of the things that impresses me most is how your president used good, strong, confirmed data in order to go into war against Iraq. You didn’t have the fear-based jingoistic saber rattling MAC lemmings count on—just well researched, verified information to support a great decision that has, and will have great benefits for mankind.
What’s really great is journalists didn’t question the administration’s information. That would have been unpatriotic like those loudmouth liberal. Those liberals should STFU. There’s no place in America for dissent or questioning their government.
Your potential. Our passion.™
And this is news because? Windoz users have spread lies since Windoz 3.0
“Paranoia big destroyer” -The Kinks
Great post Zune-Tang! That was hilarious! I couldn’t stop laughing. You really should do a stand-up routine.
Wait…your’e SERIOUS?!?
Anyone questioning whether Apple products “hold their value” should take a look at old Macs on ebay. I’ve been trying to get my hands on a 20″ iMac G4, discontinued for four freakin’ years, and they’re still going for over £400 (that’s about $800!)!
Four freakin’ years, people!
David Morgenstern hints at something that is endemic in the technology industry: a silent, ongoing PR war. Similar to the cloak-and-dagger spy games of World War II and the Cold War, in the background behind what we read each day is vicious fight for influence and PR high ground. Consider the following: Steve Ballmer of Microsoft is known not to like Apple. His company’s launch of Windows Vista was a very expensive dud. Microsoft has lost mojo and street cred compared to Apple. So what is the aggressive leader of one of the world’s largest corporations to do? Use the oldest tool in their arsenal: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD).
Microsoft employs an army of over 700 PR professionals, both who work directly for the company and through several PR agencies. Perhaps better than anything else, Microsoft is brilliant a FUD. Through their PR team, they reach out to business and IT media, along with influential business executives like the one described in Morgenstern’s article. The strategy of this Microsoft PR campaign is to beat down the public’s perception of Apple and its products. While Apple shot itself in the foot during the Scully and Spindler era (and almost shot itself in the heart until Steve Jobs returned), Microsoft went for the throat, unleashing a ruthless PR FUD attack that almost killed the company. And now, with the resurgent success of Apple, growing market share, and explosive growth of the iPod, iTunes and the iPhone, Microsoft is at it again. The FUD campaign, if you look carefully enough, is very coordinated. Do you really think that most articles you read just “happen?” Don’t be serious. Most articles are planted or pitched by PR firms. So if you see a wave of similar articles, be a bit skeptical. It’s the handiwork of PR firms. And Microsoft is no exception here.
Then there are the shorts. In a falling stock market, it’s their time to shine. Sometimes, it’s a band of privateers, little guys timing the market and out for a quick buck. They’re in it for themselves, and they don’t care who they take down. If the shorts see a high flying company like Apple that they can undermine with false rumors and innuendo, with the result being a drop in stock price from which they can profit with a short position, they’ll do it. It’s nothing personal, it’s just about greed.
What makes this time different is that I believe the short attack was orchestrated not by a pirate ship or two, but by a naval armada of large institutional investors and hedge funds. The timing could not be better. The big investors had taken horrible losses from the sub-prime market, the result of their absolute greed and lust for money. So they took a page from the book of the pirates and launched a full-scale short attack on Apple stock. Never mind that the company had just reported record earnings or that their results far exceeded Wall Street’s projections. Instead, the large institutional investors planned an attack on Apple stock based on forward-looking guidance.
I am sure that Apple is very conservative with guidance, and I have always felt this to be a very good thing. (Personally, I think guidance should be abolished, and I would love to scold Wall Street analysts for being so stupid and lazy as to not be able to make reasonably accurate earnings projections on their own.) But to slam the company’s market cap by 30% based on conservative guidance instead of actual earnings is ridiculous. It’s so illogical that I can only conclude, and saw that this was backed by anecdotal evidence, that this had been planned in advance by some large power players on Wall Street. The goal: to drive down Apple stock value and make a quick and very large buck.
I could go on about these two different activities that have the same goal: to destroy a brilliantly innovative company. But I won’t. My reason is simple: anything else that I said would be unprintable.
The whisper campaign is alive and well right here at MDN and in other Mac forums. Where ever Mac users meet, one need only read what other people are saying to know that there are both overt criticisms as well as subtle, long-term, silent campaigns that continually undermine consumer confidence.
No where is it more evident than when listening to someone criticize Apple when they have never used any of its products. Usually when they’re challenged they do one of two things; they lie, or plead ignorance.
Overt campaigns like the one carried out by Right Again are easily dismissed because his “facts” always belie his integrity. He can’t sustain an overt attack using lies, we’re too smart for that. These people drift away with the smell.
However, the Man who uses old Macs uses subtle tactics to perpetuate niggling annoyances that most of us have already moved past. These same people always preface their negative assaults with their resume of Mac experience or the number of products they’ve owned, in order to buy them enough time to carry out their mission. These are the people who always say, “I would buy one of the new iMacs but…” the ‘but’ is always followed by some perceived flaw that is the deal breaker. He probably has a Matte Rules tat.
Silent assassins, they move among us, sewing seeds of doubt. The smartest among them pick on one particular flaw and will manage to slip it into the conversation at every turn. Timing is everything. Even tho many of us have found workarounds already or it impacts us not, it still finds its way into the conversation. Remember that.
The poor switcher souls we find among us are susceptible to these ninja tactics. These subtle backhanded comments are easily dismissed by veterans, but can have a chilling effect on the noob.
The whisper campaigns always begin just before product releases and turn overt after introduction. Those among us who have no use for the product will move forward. The haters seize on the obvious, hit the Caps Lock and start typing, while the silent assassins look for cunning ways to drop their stink bombs in the crowd before moving on.
To G4Dualie: Well said.
“He probably has a Matte Rules tat.”
And very funny! Those damn glossy droolers ruined my birthday party. With their shiny scooters and greasy, melted cheese fondue. GET OFF MY LAWN!
“based on as casual comment from an aquaintance, …”
Wink-wink, nudge-nudge, say no more, say no more.
A whisper campagin about a whisper campaign. How delightful!
The best way to stop a whisper campaign is to reveal this fellows name.
Of course this is MS astroturfing.
Look at the earnings spin for Apple and MS. MS barely beats earnings, does not give Q2 guidance, and raises the full-year guidance by a couple pennies. This is taken by the media as positive guidance.
Apple, crushes earnings, gives its normally conservative Q2 guidance, which if met would crush last year’s numbers. And yet, analysts talk about disappointing guidance?!?
If you compare the percentages, Apple’s results crushed MS’s, and even their guidance was fine. MS just ignored Q2 guidance, and the market got spun a 180.
When Bill Gates gave a lame CES, did their share price crash?
Later tonight, Morgenstern and his source are going to braid each other’s hair, make s’mores and then tell each other who they really, really, really like.
ZuneTang must have read the MSTech Net article on how to speed up Vista where Microsoft said, “When you experience slow sluggish performance the system needs to be rebooted.”
Here’s a news flash, I have an Open Solaris system that runs as fast today as it did the day I installed and set it up, 27 months ago. I have Mac OS X Servers that are only every rebooted after OS updates and run just find for months and months and months all without a reboot. If the system needs to be rebooted to speed up the OS the OS is broken and needs to be fixed.
It’s not Apple that Microsoft needs to be concerned with in replacing their relevance in the IT industry it’s Open Source. Apache HTTPd is by far the most deployed webserver software in the world not IIS and most of the servers running Apache are not Windows. Microsoft thinks that Silverlight will change that, just like they thought ActiveX would kill Java, APS would replace JSP and .Net would replace servlets and Java Application Servers. Just the opposite is happing Enterprise Customers all over the world are moving to Open Standards and in most cases to Open Source Software.
Here’s a list of Microsoft failures for everyones enjoyment:
Bob
ActiveX
Plays for sure
.Net
ASP
IIS
The Big Ass table
Windows ME
OOXML
Windows Vista
The Zune
Passport
MSN Search engine (now called Live)
Windows Mobile
MS Speak to text (replaced by IBMs Dragon Naturally Speaking)
Internet Explorer (bundling)
Too many people are just to lazy to switch to FireFox, Opera or any other browser so the IE browser numbers stay artificially high. If your browser does not pass Acid Test 2 then it’s not standards compliant and is well buggy and broken, Firefox is close and Safari in perfect as is Omni web. Standards compliance will become more and more important in the future as Enterprise accelerates their demands for standards compliance in order to stay competitive.
Send these guys all back to Dumbfsckistan.
Ed writes:
“If the shorts see a high flying company like Apple that they can undermine with false rumors and innuendo, with the result being a drop in stock price from which they can profit with a short position, they’ll do it. It’s nothing personal, it’s just about greed.”
Agreed. The only fly in the ointment is that that sort of activity is known as “Stock Manipulation” which as per the SEC is illegal.
I’m sure that there are some that will claim “Oh, boys will be boys and it happens all the time”. That’s merely a rationalization to try to avoid tracking down the guilty parties…and I’m sure that the SEC will take the as-narrow-as-a-blind-man view that the crash in the stock price from unfounded rumors isn’t “damage” if no one who was “in” on the whisper campaign profited directly by selling the stock short.
-hh
I don’t think that MacDailyNews understands the concept of a whisper campaign…
Posting links to articles about how Apple is ranking high or do well in widely published sources is irrelevant to a whisper campaign. A whisper campaign would start with employees of competitors (or people who otherwise just don’t like Apple) spreading bad rumors about the company by word-of-mouth, not mass publication.
“APPLE hear me please….in your commercials SHOW what the mac can DO….kids already know about them”
Dear GOD would you fscks stop whining about the lack of an INFOMERCIAL!!!!!!!
“I again call on Steve Jobs to spin off the toy making business, and personally run it if he wants, and leave serious computer making to serious computer makers.”
Stop posting here. You’re an idiot.
You’ve been making these rants on here a bout the whole nonsense about “serious computers” and “get out of the ‘toy’ making market.
It’s absolute rubbish. Guess what, as a stock holder I DONT GIVE A FLYING CRAP IF APPLE SELLS COMPUTERS OR TOASTERS. All I care about is that they do it, do it well, and I keep making money off of it.
And BTW, most of the anti-Apple PC fanboy retards out there hate Apple because supposedly they make computers that “aren’t good for playing games”
Who makes toys? Tell me? Please.
@ Ampar
I LOL’d. Well done.
It is hardly a WHISPER, MORE LIKE A SHOUT CAMPAIGN.
May not strictly hold thier value, but I still use a 1999/2000 pinstrip G4 tower on occasion and it still works as good as the day I bought it.
Is anyone really listening to “whispers” over the shouts of tens of thousands of happy mac, iphone, and ipod customers? Yeah, didn’t think so.