Wednesday, September 12, 2012

"Apple Does Not Care About Small Business"

SolutionsforBullying@gmail.com www.SolutionsforBullying.com

Wow! With the iCloud outage at Apple growing toward 36 hours (1.5 business days), I have had the occasion to speak to several customer service agents in their Apple Care group. Each of them indicated they were apologetic about the iCloud outage that many Apple customers are experiencing, but also indicated that Apple users "should not be using iCloud for business use and we do not have an 'ETA' on when it will be fixed."  Even when I escalated the complaint  up a few levels, I was met with the same response. Amazing. 

In fact, the Apple Care agents said that the Apple service contract does not guarantee against outages and "should not be used for business."

Fascinating.

As an aside, Small Business in the US as a percentage of our GDP:

Small business owners "Pay 44 percent of total U.S. private payroll. • Generated 65 percent of net new jobs over the past 17 years. • Create more than half of the nonfarm private GDP."( source: SBA.gov)

So, Apple is recommending that 44% of private employers should not use their products?

Fascinating.

As the leader of two non-profits and an owner of a small business, I rely heavily on the 9 pieces of Apple hardware in my home office. Further, the countless applications and types of software are indispensable to those organizations. 

Further, this is the third major outage iCloud has has in 9 months. As all of you iCloud users will remember, we as consumers, were forced to move from MobileMe to iCloud by Apple earlier this year.

To be clear, Apple's sin in this episode is not the outage itself , rather it is the arrogance attached to the following actions:

1. Releasing a faulty and ill-tested product prematurely to make more money
2. Communicating to small business owners that they should not be using their products for business when clearly they are developed, made and marketed with small business in mind
3. Not prioritizing fixing an outage and lying on the systems support page about timing to resolve the issue.

I have been a huge fan of Apple for many years, but am ridiculously disappointed and frustrated to the point of moving all of my business and organizational needs to other 
technology leaders.

Other small business owners please sound off.