Reputation Management Online

Whenever Apple announces anything, the Tech world stops to discuss it as they are changing the world. Don’t get me wrong, I love the look and feel of Apple products, own an iPad which I utterly adore but I don’t strictly think of Apple as innovative any more. I also don’t think of them as a victory of style over substance so I am not a critic really. What they do, they do absolutely brilliantly down to the last detail. In so many ways they do little small touches where it really matters. At the same time, I don’t trust them at all and rarely use iTunes to buy music, don’t use the Mac that sits on a desk near me and don’t own an iPhone. I know they are excellent software engineers.. but for me they stand for an old paradigm of producer and consumer. They build things where you are not allowed under the hood to fiddle. I dont like that as my whole reading of the Internet age is that we get to fiddle and own our devices. Ping made me wonder whether I had Apple wrong after all and they were about to start embracing social media after all. For me Apple is cool in the designer sense and not cool in the run amok, dance in the mud in Glastonbury sense. Sounds strange but I think of them as the cool people in the bar that you are scared to talk to, but actually turn out to be nerdy and dweebish and are boring in bed because they are so self conscious. So is Ping the mashed up social web or a nervous half-hearted stab in the dark by Apple. Well, since I cannot access the iTunes store or rather the Ping part of it, it is impossible to say There is the question why I am writing this article at all. Reputations are like trees. They take time to grow and shape and they are difficult to change as time passes. Many successful companies rarely transition to business environments and I sense that this is what is happening with Apple. Already within one day their relationship with the uber-social Facebook has died, and it got me thinking that one of the aspects of Apple products is that they never seem to really talk on social media much.  They are wonderful devices and you can use them to do wonderful creative things but they don’t seem to go further. You consume them. What is the experience of Ping? Well it is not social and because it does not connect to anything else it is hard to see how I am going to use it. The main problem is that I cannot connect to anybody without emailing them which I cannot be bothered to do. You know, what with facebook, twitter and apps like Grooveshark (which Apple resolutely will not allow onto the apstore) why do i need Ping? I mean really, who cares.