social market, rules of the game

excerpted from blog article by J. Kim,
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning/what_i_believe_and_why_apple_makes_me_wrong

...Markets Are Conversations: The idea is that we don't just buy products, we invest in relationships. We will not purchase products or services from a company that we don't trust. We are no longer blind consumers, easily influenced by mass marketing. Rather, we are empowered users, and we like to do business with companies that listen to our needs and authentically engage us on many levels. Perhaps you have had a meaningful (strategic) conversation with someone from Apple outside of the Genius Bar, (again - I'm excluding campus reps who are awesome but not involved in developing products or services), with Apple I'm left still talking to myself.

Open Over Proprietary: The web is all about open standards. All things being equal, we'd rather invest in open source applications and open source platforms, investing our resources in people rather than licensing. But I'm writing this on a MacBook Pro running 10.6.8 (not Linux), and with an iPhone in my pocket (closed OS). Mobile web apps might be great, but can they really compete with the apps designed for iOS on the App store?

Transparency is Essential: I'm constantly arguing for greater transparency in the projects that I'm involved with. Put up the project documents on the web. Blog or tweet about the process. Talk about what did not work as well as what did. Yet Apple remains the opposite of transparent, a black hole of information.

Fail Fast and Often: Sure, Apple has some failures. The Apple TV, the Lisa from 1983 ($10,000), the hockey puck mouse, the Power Mac G4 Cube (2000), Ping. All of these seem like small change however, products that Jobs and company never really got behind. Maybe Apple learned from Motorola ROKR "iTunes" phone (2005), and definitely from the failure of MobileMe, but success after success seems to best characterize the history of Apple's product launches.

I would never want to run a company (or a university) the way Apple has been run. Apple's management culture, at least from the outside, goes totally against my (academic) values. Yet, it is hard to argue with the results.