We’ve had our fair share of Apple customer service experiences—actually, I’m having one as I write this, chatting with a MobileMe rep. And we know that, like with any company’s customer service, Apple has its ups and its downs.
Fortunately, the word seems to be that even with its downs, Apple’s still has the most positively-regarded customer service in the computer industry. You know when you get that robotic voice at the end of a call that asks you how satisfied you are with your experience? Turns out that’s not just for the amusement of making you talk to a robot. The survey from VocaLabs, the company that tracks that data, shows that Apple topped the customer service charts with 60% proclaiming themselves “very satisfied,” in contrast to only 44% of Dell customers and 37% of Gateway customers.
In general, Apple walked away with a 52% customer satisfaction rating, as opposed to 45% of Dell and 39% of Gateway, making them king of the customer service world (with all attendant privileges and benefits).
Me, I’m still chatting with this MobileMe service rep to see if I can recover some files that have vanished from my iDisk. We’ll see if I nudge Apple’s customer satisfaction up or down by the end of this (so far looks like downnn).
Guys, I’ve got some bad news. You might want to sit down. Jerry Yang, the CEO of Yahoo, well, he’s resigning. I know this is going to be hard on all of us, but—wait, what? You knew? But, how? Oh. Right. There was that whole begging Microsoft to take them back after they shot Redmond down like Jenny Slater when I asked her to the senior prom. Yeah. And the failed deal with Google. And the fact that Yahoo’s stock closed at under $11 yesterday.
Yeah—it hasn’t been a great year for you, Jerry, has it?
Anyway, Yang, who also co-founded the company back in, oh, 1845 or so, will step down as CEO, but will remain on the board under his old title of Chief Yahoo (chief Yahoo? We’ll see what Mr. Serious has to say about that). No news on who might replace Yang as CEO, but a little Googling suggests that we may have found just the person to, erm, take the opposite direction from Yang.
Man, Taoist humor gets me every time.
We brought you news yesterday on some of the risk factors Apple sees in the year going forward, gleaned from the densely informative 10-K form that they filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Of course, that’s hardly the only diamond in the 100-page rough, so here’s a round-up of other interesting details that have been extracted.
First up, Apple has apparently staffed up considerably in the last year, going from 21,600 full time employees to 32,000, an increase of 48%. Most of Apple’s employees work in retail and the company opened 50 new stores in 2008—between that and adding employees to existing store, it accounts for about 8,000 of those 10,800 new employees.
The second figure was a staggering increase in the number of Mac sales, which rose by 2.7 million units from 2007 to 2008, a rate of 38% in both units and net sales. Apple sold 9.715 million Macs in 2008 and, as TMO points out, the $14.2 billion in Mac sales trumped Apple’s total revenue of $13.93 billion in 2005. That’s quite a jump in just three short years.
As Infinite Loop reports, a special note was added towards the end of the 10-K spelling out Apple’s arrangement with outgoing senior VP Tony Fadell, whose title is now Special Advisor to the CEO. Fadell will continue to draw a $300,000/year salary and pull down benefits through March 24th, 2010 (Mac OS X’s 9th birthday, coincidentally?). While Fadell will lose 155,000 shares of unvested stocks, he’ll get 77,500 restricted shares that vest in full on March 24th, 2010—as long as he continues to work with the company. He also agrees not solicit Apple employees with employment offers for a year after he leaves the company, making me wonder if maybe Tony plans on striking out on his own.
Finally, a little game for you. The 10-K lists not only all the members of Apple’s executive team, but their ages as well. See if you can match the exec with the age (answers provided after the jump).
| 1. Steve Jobs | a) 48 |
| 2. Tim Cook | b) 53 |
| 3. Phil Schiller | c) 45 |
| 4. Scott Forstall | d) 50 |
| 5. Ron Johnson | e) 57 |
| 6. Peter Oppenheimer | f) 39 |
| 7. Daniel Cooperman | g) 47 |
Continue reading "10-K roundup: Employees and Mac sales get a boost and guess the executive's age!"
Another year, another general manager for Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit. Last year, the MacBU replaced outgoing GM and lackluster keynote presenter Roz Ho with former AOL Wireless general manager Craig Eisler. But the revolving door continues to, er, revolve, and Eisler has moved on to greener pastures at MS’s Entertainment & Devices division…which, strangely enough, is where Ho ended up too. In other news: cattle mutilations are up.
Eisler’s replacement is Eric Wilfrid, a 14 year Microsoft vet who’s been with the MacBU since its humble beginnings back in 1997. Previously, Wilfrid was a Product Unit Manager overseeing MacBU engineers; he started at Microsoft working on PowerPoint in ‘94 and, after joining MacBU, worked on seven releases of Office for Mac, as well as MSN and Virtual PC. Certainly seems tough to doubt his street cred.
That seems like it might be an improvement. Eisler seemed pleasant enough, but even at his appointment we weren’t sure why he ended up there, given that his prior experience had been working at AOL and on DirectX. Given that Wilfrid’s been at MacBU since the beginning, that would seem to bode well for his experience and knowledge. We’re looking forward to it.
All may be fair in love and war, but business is business. Former Apple ally IBM has sued the head of its blade server team in order to block his move to Apple. The executive’s contract contained a noncompete clause that prevents him from working elsewhere in the industry for a year after leaving IBM.
It gets better, though, mainly because the dude’s name—and I could not make this up—is Mark Papermaster. That. Is. Awesome. I have to admit, I’ve seen a lot of weird surnames in my time—heck, I’ve got a kind of weird surname—but, there’s just something beautiful about a guy whose family probably did at one point master paper ending up in charge of computer servers.
Until last week, Papermaster was the vice president of the Blade Development unit at IBM, which sells blade servers to corporations, but he’s also worked in IBM’s research and development, including the Power microprocessor. IBM contends that means he knows much of the company’s trade secrets and IP. It’s not known precisely what position Papermaster had taken at Apple—please, please, please let it have something to do with paper. E-paper? Printing? Newspapers? Anything. Please.
In last week’s financial conference call, Steve Jobs reiterated his view that the Apple TV is a hobby for the company. He even went so far as to say that digital video in the living room as a whole had not really caught on.
I think the whole category is still a hobby right now. I don’t think anybody has succeeded at it and actually the experimentation has slowed down. A lot of the early companies that were trying things have faded away, so I’d have to say that given the economic conditions, given the venture capital outlooks and stuff, I continue to believe it will be a hobby in 2009.
That’s prompted some wondering about the future of the Apple TV. This morning, The Mac Observer’s John Martellaro posed the question of why Apple has not yet struck a deal with Netflix, who themselves have been pushing online video watching both through the Web as well as through partner devices.
Apple continues to regard Apple TV as a hobby and has curiously failed, so far, to secure an agreement with Netflix. Instead of getting an Apple TV into every Netflix subscriber’s home, Microsoft, Roku, LG, and Samsung are, in Apple’s absence, seizing the business opportunity, with likely others to come.
There are a couple of issues here, but the major reasons behind this decision have to do with Apple’s ethic: the way that they do business.
Continue reading "Why Apple won't push the red envelope"
It wasn't but two years ago that the iPod was one of Apple's main sources of revenue. These days--Q4 2008 to be precise--the iPod (not including the iPhone) only accounts for less than 15 percent of Apple's total revenue; 24 months ago it was over 30 percent and in Q1 2006 it was over 50 percent.
That's according to some new analysis by blogger-analyst Andy Zaky, who has made some rather interesting predictions about Apple's financial behavior in recent weeks.
Not surprisingly, the lower percentage is due to rampant sales of iPhones, which itself made up over 40 percent of Apple's current revenue from last quarter (when taking into account Apple's adjusted, non-GAAP figures). In fact, that plus Mac sales are over 71 percent for the company as a whole. This data continues to show that Apple remains, at its core (no pun intended), a hardware company. That's clearly where the money is--software and iTunes sales combined are less than 20 percent.
[via Apple 2.0]
Time was, writer John Hodgman was known for his vast knowledge of hobos, as opposed to representing the PC in Apple's "Get a Mac" ads. Oh, how times change.
While discussing his new book, Hodgman talked to TIME about what it's like being Mr. PC (yes, that's my new name for him):
I was really curious as to why they asked me to audition. My career as a magazine writer was largely prefaced on the idea of curiosity, to go on adventures and weasel my way into the lives of people that I admire. The process of auditioning for a commercial seemed like a process where I might learn something that I could write about. It did not occur to me that it might lead to the job. I got called back, and by the third time we talked, I thought, "You can't really be serious."
But thank goodness they were serious, Mr. Hodgman (Mr. PC). Justin Long may be no slouch as as the Mac but it's the interplay between the two "computers" that keeps me coming back for more. Now can we work in some hobo and mole-men jokes in the next "Get a Mac" ads, Apple? You know that would be nine kinds of awesome.
