Wow, or from the When-Apple-Became-the-Borg Department

http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/65338904338/wow-or-from-the-when-apple-became-the-borg-department

by mxfh • 13 years ago

312 85 13 years ago

lessig.tumblr.com

ebbv2• 13 years ago

Apple and Google do take very cold, inhuman approaches toward customer service (or lack of it.) Except in the case of the Apple Store where the employees are generally quite friendly, even if their actual helpfulness varies greatly from individual to individual.

That said, it would be moronic of them to allow comments/threads which are advocating people to take legal action against the company on their own boards. It doesn't matter if the customer is right or not, those kinds of posts are only going to result in more angry, pitchfork wielding customers. I expect pretty much any company, even ones much more customer friendly than Apple, would remove such posts.

bsimpson• 13 years ago

Google phone support for Chromebooks is surprisingly good.

ebbv2• 13 years ago

That's good to hear. Their support for most of their products is non-existent, though. :)

Pxtl4• 13 years ago

I found them quite helpful when I sent my N7 for RMA, too. Seems like they get it right for paying public consumers - I guess that's the demo that's critical to your reputation. Everybody expects corporate clients and free public users to get crapped on, but once you're paying for a physical widget you expect the warranty signed in blood.

ctdonath2• 13 years ago

Yup. The problem seems a small matter of an OTA software update. The solution being posted - and deleted - is demanding a replacement of >US$500 of hardware. Whatever the reason for not fixing the actual problem, what's being advocated as a solution isn't: it's just a way of counter-irritating the company into (one hopes) releasing an actual fix. Abusive behavior is not corrected by abusive behavior in return. There's some reason the correct fix hasn't been released (whether you agree with the reason or not), Apple doesn't want to talk about it for whatever reason makes sense to them, and of course will stop any advocacy of malicious behavior on their servers designed to manipulate the company into doing something they have reason not to.

pja• 13 years ago

It's hardly "malicious behaviour" to expect a company to deliver the service their product advertising claimed.

jevinskie• 13 years ago

Your product doesn't work and the company refuses to support it or fix the issue. What are you supposed to do, suck it up and be happy with your $500 paperweight?

metaphorm• 13 years ago

counter-irritating them to actually fix the problem sounds like a good plan to me.

conception• 13 years ago

I'm not sure how this is a particularly different policy from any mega-corporation. I've never seen any great support on online forums from the company in question. If you're having a wi-fi problem, follow the company's support potocol, which in this case is probably go to the genius bar and get it fixed. Where you'll probably have a better experience than if you tried to get help for a competing product.

I wish company forums did have more interaction than they do, but it's certainly not an Apple thing. They are universally "community" run and company censored.

GuiA• 13 years ago

This is only the first point of his post. The second, and more important, point being that Apple employees are actively deleting messages in which users explain how one can exerce their warranty rights to get the iPhone replaced.

jewbacca• 13 years ago

I know it's a profoundly different area of the industry, but it's reasonably common practice in videogames (PC gaming, at least) for official spokespeople, even designers, and very occasionally developers, to engage with the community, on at least the general zeitgeist of its concerns.

ex: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/blizztracker/

And even in more "traditional" and supposedly conservative industries... I could find some references for you but I don't think I'd need to given how widely-covered some of these have been, of the customer support PR coups that have been achieved over social media in general (primarily Twitter and Reddit; at least in my personal experience). It is obviously less structured than an archived, time-ordered, hierarchical, and easily-searchable forum designed for permanence, and I don't have the slightest sense of the proportion of customer issues that go /un/-addressed in this manner.

But viewed through this lens... customer support is public politics. It's totally understandable that Apple would want to both maintain their image of aloofness from non-visionary matters, and deliberately avoid validating the existence of problems with their products in a public forum, which would also contradict a decades-long and painstakingly-crafted image. But it's also totally okay if the community or some segment of it makes a stink in the hopes of shifting the PR calculation.

post_break• 13 years ago

Since 2006 when I first switched I don't remember Apple ever officially posting in those forums. This isn't something new. Their support channels are the phone number, and employees at the store. The forums are just their for archive really.

jamesbritt2• 13 years ago

The key point of Lessig's post is not that Apple reps do not post there, it is that Apple reps remove posts that offer tangible, actionable, information, for flimsy reasons.

A forum use posted information about how to get an issue resolved by exercising one's warranty rights; that post was removed. Lessig reposted that info; it was also removed, and Lessig was informed that the forum does not allow for "polls or petitions."

epo• 13 years ago

One problem is that warranty rights vary around the world, so any advice relating to specific rights will be irrelevant to most people.

mergy• 13 years ago

Anyone old enough to remember Apple back in the 90s?

This sort of activity reminds me of the actions Apple took to try and hide the mess of the roll-out of Open Transport and all the network mess it caused for folks.

usaphp2• 13 years ago

Why did not he just call apple or visit their store?

I want to see him dealing with Google or other big company via community forums, I remember a story on HN when a nexus was released and people could not get the phone for months after they paid for it, they could not even get a phone number to call and ask a question. Apple has a genius bar at their stores and a phone support, you can not seriously expect a reply from apple representative on a community forum.

axus• 13 years ago

His main complaint was the censoring of posts related to warranties, the technical problem and the "no comments" were smaller issues.

skwirl• 13 years ago

You only get 90 days of phone support with new Apple products unless you buy AppleCare. I don't know about the person who wrote this article, but many people do not live near Apple stores. Even where I live in metro Boston, it takes 40 minutes to get to one from my home (red line to green line, ugh). Where I grew up in Upstate NY, the nearest is 70 miles away.

Pxtl4• 13 years ago

The AppleCare might explain things. They want people to pay for Apple's high-quality care and get the great Apple experience that way, not get low-quality crappy free support from a forum. So the forum is only operated out of necessity - if Apple didn't run one, somebody else would - and it can't be a support avenue because Apple must always control the quality of the experience and you have to pay Apple for that.

It's actually consistent and reasonable when you look at Apple's obsession with quality.

davidw• 13 years ago

It's not terribly relevant who he is, but here it is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Lessig

revelation• 13 years ago

Google has a better approach here. In their forums, they will promote power users to semi-moderators. These people then, drunk on the (useless) power bestowed upon them by Google, do their best to fend off and send into nirvana actual problems, or just shower askers with pointless routine stuff (reinstall, turn it off and on again) until they give up.

CodeCube• 13 years ago

Wow, this is the best description I've ever seen of user moderators that I've encountered on certain company/product forums.

smrtinsert• 13 years ago

If you buy a consumer electronics device from Google this is what you'd expect though. Apple users are promised to never have to think for themselves again. Apparently it takes Geniuses to do that, available at your nearest over priced retail center.

nemof• 13 years ago

It's pretty depressing to admit that yeah, I buy google products despite their customer service, not because of it.

I deeply dislike it when companies attitude to helping their customer is sending them in a loop through a series of FAQ pages without an actual human you can talk to within a thousand miles.

Shivetya• 13 years ago

Two notes.

1) Thank you for copying that message, here I sit with a 16g White 4s and now I certainly do not want the upgrade.

2) Welcome to Apple Support. That site is much more useful to me for figuring out how to use my Apple product than to fix it. I remember the woes of Wi-Fi being lost on my iMac. Having posts deleted, and watching a thread morph into a years long thousand post monstrosity. All without a chirp from Apple, but yeah they do take down posts. Especially anything where people posted about taking their iMacs into the store.

if you have Applecare, call them. Make it cost them money. Get enough people to swamp their phones or stores might wake them up

bambax• 13 years ago

Why isn't there a forum for Apple products not controlled by Apple? Shouldn't there be a stackexchange site for this?

Lawrence Lessing needs to ask Joel Spolsky about this.

Edit: as mentioned below, the site already exists. So people need to be using it instead of an Apple forum where the most useful posts get deleted by The Firm...

nathan_long• 13 years ago

You mean this one? http://apple.stackexchange.com/

dotmanish• 13 years ago

What? http://apple.stackexchange.com/

driverdan2• 13 years ago

There are a ton of Apple discussion forums, including the Stack Exchange one others have posted.

KaiserPro• 13 years ago

Sadly this isn't news.

Apple have been doing this for the last 5 years at least.

I support a large fleet of Macpros (Ha, yeah "fast" and "magical" with 5 year old procs in them) Everytime an OS upgrade comes along something is silently broken. Trying to get support is a nightmare. For example when they changed which version of kerberos they used without any warning. Or changing the syntax of automount.

Apple are shits and have always been. Just like google[1].

[1]don't get me started on them. they keep on pissing about with the admin console for paid google apps, without warning.

w0utert• 13 years ago

Apple is shit, Google is shit, Microsoft is shit, and the list continues...

Not trying to defend anyone here, but with so many customers, products, software versions, it's no surprise problems will occur, which are sometimes inappropriately handled. This goes for any company, Apple is no exception here. I have years of anecdotal evidence of only positive experiences with Apple products and customer service, the only difference between me and the people affected by this WiFi bug is that I don't feel the need to start a blog to praise Apple for the joy I get using their products.

avenger1232• 13 years ago

Please, I appreciated the comment and I've heard likewise elsewhere. KaiserPro didn't just say 'Apple is shit', there was examples given for the sentiment. I read more frustration in the statement than just the statement.

Guess what? For one, I appreciate hearing the negatives since in the Apple world all we get is 'how great it all is'. You may not feel the need to praise Apple but other's have gladly taken your place many times over.

scrabble• 13 years ago

I like Yahoo.

My ISP uses their mail service as their web mail access. Through many updates to Yahoo's web mail app, I always neglected not to update and was able to continue using my more than 10 year old mail interface, until recently when I finally decided to agree to update.

fennecfoxen• 13 years ago

Recently, though, with expanding market share in the mobile space and laptops, Apple is the new Microsoft.

Unfortunately Microsoft is still the old Microsoft.

randomhunt• 13 years ago

Microsoft consumer product support is indeed utter crap, but I've found their developer support amazingly good.

We had a weird issue with something on Azure, raised the issue and got not only somebody very knowledgeable replying quickly who pointed us in the right direction but also had the docs updated a day or two later.

Contrast to the utter crap "support" we got when an IntelliPoint update had a fight with the Alps software on Dell Latitude laptops and randomly triggered a gazillion consecutive UAC elevation prompts. After being told by "support" for the third time to do something stupid like disable UAC or turn it off and on again we just nuked IntelliPoint from orbit and voila, problem fixed. The next update of IntelliPoint fixed the issue so I'm sure someone managed to report it correctly.

SomeCallMeTim2• 13 years ago

It also happens in Apple's (paid) developer support bug tracker.

When a new OS X release broke something that killed some 40 products at a company I used to work for, they simply made the bug report "private" so that others couldn't see it. Some of the products that they broke had to be rewritten to use a completely different technology, the breakage was so bad.

Google....has its own issues, but at least doesn't delete public bug reports. Sorry, I do have my own issues with Google, but Apple's behavior is a step beyond "poor customer support practices" and full into "dishonest and deceptive practices," which in my book is worse.

vsl• 13 years ago

This… doesn’t ring true, considering that Apple’s bug tracker isn’t public at all — bug reports are not publicly visible or searchable, only the submitter and Apple can see them. That’s why openradar.me exists in the first place. So the claim that Apple "made the bug report "private" so that others couldn't see it” fails the smell test.

vdaniuk2• 13 years ago

“It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institution and merely lukewarm defenders in those who gain by the new ones. ” ― Niccolò Machiavelli

daraosn• 13 years ago

Same story for 2011 Q1 MBP, it seems like the Graphics are defect for several models and suddenly started to fail for several customers about now... +800 posts, NO RESPONSE FROM APPLE!!

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4766577

slantyyz2• 13 years ago

I had this issue pop up in late 2012/early 2013 on my 2011 MBP. It was just visual at first but after a few months, it turned into system crippling hangs.

I replaced my mobo this past summer under Applecare ($500 if you don't have coverage). Guess what they replaced it with? A logic board that exhibited the same issues two months later.

A friend of mine just started experiencing the glitches on his 2011 MBP.

My current workaround is to make sure that I unplug all external monitors, and shut down with the setting that no app windows get reopen. If you have an application that forces the discrete GPU to be used (Coda, for example), it can cause startup hangs.

driverdan2• 13 years ago

To those who help others on Apple, Google, or other big multinational business discussion groups / forums, why do you do so?

I understand helping others with a startup's product that you like. You want it to succeed and an increased customer base will most likely lead to product improvements. But billion dollar businesses have the resources to provide support themselves. Why would you do it for them for free?

TheCapn• 13 years ago

I've done it casually on various games or forums simply because when you use the communities sometimes the effort it takes to make a quick helpful comment is worth it. If you're already participating in the community then often times the notoriety of helping others is enough to keep you going. Other times I feel a slight obligation to give back to users who helped me in the first place.

akbiggs• 13 years ago

I see the point you're making here, but I feel like the motivations you're pointing at for why people post on discussion groups and forums isn't correct in most cases. At least in my experience, people tend to post helpful advice because helping people out feels good. It also provides an ego boost when people view you as an expert at something.

jamesbritt2• 13 years ago

Right. If someone slips on ice on the sidewalk in front of a store, you don't ignore them and think, hey, the store owner is on the hook here; not my problem.

You help that person get up.

That doesn't absolve anyone of their rightful responsibilities, but it does make for a nicer world.

chime• 13 years ago

I've helped on these forums when I've had a similar problem and finally managed to get it working on my own. In that case, sharing what worked for me takes 2 mins but can help make someone's day. Same reason people post on Usetnet, StackOverflow and even here on HN I guess. It's not about giving free support to a company's customers. It's about helping out someone in trouble.

brador• 13 years ago

The worst part is no rollback on IOS without root combined with unstoppable upgrades. The only way I stop my devices updating is keeping them under 1GB free space so the update can't download. This is terrible for an enterprise environment where software stability is a key criteria.

If they allowed rollback this problem would solve itself until a fix was created and pushed out. Instead, they get angry users.

gtufano• 13 years ago

Automatic upgrades stop is only one switch in preferences away. I use it to preserve iOS versions I have to test with.

About rollbacks, I'm told that this will leave the baseband modem (not downgradable) in a version not tested with main OS. I can imagine Apple (or any corporation) not willing to support it (if it's true, it seems reasonable, but I really don't know). It can be done, btw, only it's not easy, not for end-users, and, AFAIK, must be planned before upgrade (I know many people that did it).

brudgers• 13 years ago

Assimilation means buying an iPhone 5s or 5c, not upgrading an old one.

Geeze, that was easy.

dragontamer• 13 years ago

I know its a typical blog post... but this is the Lawrence Lessing. I hate to hype him up (especially since this post of his is just a "humble blog post" about one annoying issue), but Lawrence Lessing has a huge following.

Creator of Creative Commons, Rootstrikers, friend and lawyer of Aaron Swartz... Lawrence Lessing is a name that should be respected in every online community.

Again, this seems to be just one of the low-key blog posts that he makes, so don't assign it too much. But for those wondering "who the hell is this guy?"... well... you definitely should know him.

pit• 13 years ago

It's astounding how rudely he's being treated in his own comments section.

cincinnatus• 13 years ago

Who it is coming from makes it seem all the more whiny. And hyperbolic.

wtdominey• 13 years ago

As others have pointed out, this isn't anything new. Apple has never been comfortable with public feedback and has pruned comments (and sometimes entire threads) from their discussions for as long as I can remember (and that's a pretty long time). Even when Apple was on-the-ropes in the mid-to-late 90s they behaved like "the Borg". Nothing has changed.

jimhefferon• 13 years ago

There is something about perceiving yourself as unassailable that makes a tremendous temptation to be the borg, to be an asshole. Surely everyone has observed that many times, from Mean Girls to MicroSoft a decade ago?

cormullion• 13 years ago

Apple Discussions moderators have been deleting dozens of messages from the iWork threads too (I had a similar email :). Nothing new, though.

mahyarm• 13 years ago

What stops these mega companies from hiring a 120 people online forum support team and removing a lot of bad will? Even if most of the posts were 'we will help you with your problem, just call this phone number'.

caryme2• 13 years ago

Forums are tough. I can see why Apple opts not to participate, although I disagree with their decision. It also seems to be consistent with the Apple ethos to remove overly negative posts and calls to action from the apple.com domain. Again, I don't like this, but I'm not surprised.

At Microsoft (at least on my team) we are encouraged to be active in our forums. We use them to keep a pulse on the issues we are having, identify bugs out in the wild, and get feedback on our products. We may sometimes sound a little robotic, since we're not going to divulge insider info or participate in arguments, but we are listening and trying to help (and attempting to figure out what is actually happening on peoples machine's, which is tough). We also provide feedback to our customer service folks in the forums, giving them answers to common problems we do know about and identifying when they provide misinformation and correct that.

I suspect that Apple reads their own forums but doesn't respond. The optimist in me says they're investigating this Wi-Fi issue due to the noise in the forums. They may not have or know a good workaround or at-home fix at this point. And frankly, it's really difficult to get any useful diagnostic information from folks in the forums (especially angry ones who turn to personal attacks on engineers - been there, done that for me on answers.microsoft.com).

justin662• 13 years ago

I can see why Apple opts not to participate

As Lessig notes, they're engaging actively in censorship. That's certainly their right, but it's not the same thing as not participating.

Perceval• 13 years ago

Requiring that posts stay on topic isn't censorship. Terms of Service are Terms of Service. There are lots and lots of other Apple/Mac/iPhone forums around the web.

aray• 13 years ago

I have seen many product forums where threads go on and on, and useful information is buried in a avalanche of noise.

On the other hand, censorship/terms-of-service removal is a grey area and by removing the information you're removing the ability of readers to make judgement calls for themselves.

Really, it would be nice if there was a way to filter/optimize the noise of normal forum spew into just the useful bits, while still having context/links to the original ginormous piles. Seems to get the best of both worlds.

vetinari• 13 years ago

I hope that you are not talking about social.technet.microsoft.com. No offense, but I always dread, when I search for a solution and the results contain this site at top positions. I've never found a solution for my problem there, just moderators following a script, without trying to really help.

caryme2• 13 years ago

I'm talking about answers.microsoft.com.

microcolonel2• 13 years ago

Blaming regulations for your decision to get a crappier warranty or SLA than you could demand elsewhere is like blaming your car manufacturer for the availability and price of fuel.

TheCowboy• 13 years ago

It's more like the car manufacturer is providing updates and bug fixes for your car, which then renders your windshield wipers or some other significant feature useless, and this problem occurs for a large number of users, then attempting to use the support forums provided by the manufacturer only to find the manufacturer not only does not respond to posts but also deletes useful posts, and also does not provide an easy way for users to downgrade so it fixes the problem.

If the only solution is to purchase a better warranty, then it seems that creates a perverse incentive for Apple to break devices which each upgrade, and only provide fixes and service to people who pay more money, in order to bilk customers to maximize profits.

I wouldn't consider this an ethical or honest way to do business with users. It is a completely valid criticism of a way of doing business.

For emphasis, this isn't a unique user-created problem, this is a problem that is originated with Apple.

It's also issues like this that will ensure that my current and first set of Apple devices will be my last Apple devices.

microcolonel2• 13 years ago

I'm talking about the absurdity of expecting explicitly-disclaimed benefits to just rain from the sky because you bought something.

It's cheap because they waive these responsibilities, it would be/is more expensive to have them not waived, that's just how it is.

There are also a few manufacturers of smartphones who guarantee against this sort of thing.

Also, the only way to maximize profits is to satisfy the customer: they offer the devices at a consumer price which is enticing to a mass market who may or may not have these issues, rather than expecting everyone to have these issues all the time, and pricing it to accommodate that. This is exactly what consumers want, cheap phones that at least typically do what is expected of them.

mumbi• 13 years ago

losethos, you're dead. just thought you should know.

teddyh• 13 years ago

He knows. Check out his comment history to see why he is.

kbenson• 13 years ago

Am I the only one that sees this forum as a honeypot to suck useful posts into a location that apple can curate and prune away anything they deem likely to be detrimental?

I understand that they have a support offering they want people to buy, but it seems to me that creating official forums that never get official responses and removing posts that espouse actions that, while not beneficial to Apple, are legal and to help customers, Apple are holding paid for usefulness of their devices ransom.

That may seem like a fairly uncharitable view, but their actions in this instance don't seem particularly charitable either.

Wow, or from the When-Apple-Became-the-Borg Department

Related Stories