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April 10, 2007

business

Sure, Apple is on the descent, if by “descent” you mean “going up”

Posted Apr. 10, ’07, 8:58 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Business

Ashkan KarbasfrooshanAnother day, another crazy, skewed look at Apple: Ashkan Karbasfrooshan thinks that Apple is on its way down. As usual, the logic behind the hypothesis is so airtight that it’s difficult to imagine why he hasn’t asphyxiated yet.

Now, remember the first rule of blog posting: grab ‘em with the intro. What’ve you got for us, Ashkan?

Apple’s iPhone lasts a mere 40 minutes? Apple TV loses out to XBOX 360? Apple customer service reminiscent of Dell (DELL), Seagate (STX), HP (HPQ) customer service? Yep, maybe even worse.
Ooh, recycling quotes from a spurious John Dvorak story and a widely-disputed AP piece. Bold move. But points off for posting on one of those sites where they put the stock ticker symbols after every company name. Lame.
If there’s one thing I know, it’s service. I spent 18 months (and one day!) doing customer service at the nation’s largest credit card issuer. I’ll spare you the war stories, but when I left, my index score was 149. You can always measure a company’s success in the marketplace by how on or off the ball their service is, and how their employees handle themselves.
Eighteen months? That’s what you’ve got? Presumably you spent nine months in a womb—does that mean you’re halfway to being an expert on obstetrics? Okay, sorry. Fine, we’ll use service as a metric. Pray, continue.

I’ve never been a Mac guy. I’ve used a PC for basic office use but our editors at WatchMojo.com use Macs, “naturally.” I was even toying with the notion of “upgrading” to a Mac soon. Not anymore.

While Dell and HP know that they create and ship boxes and don’t kid themselves, Apple tries to sell an image, a brand, a feeling, so when their CSRs drop the ball and the company fumbles, it hurts them twice as much, shattering the facade.

So you won’t be buying a Mac? Darn. We had so looked forward to having you as a reader. Anyway, yes, thanks for drilling the point home: a customer service rep somewhere hurt you, badly. We get it. Tissue?
We ordered an Apple Airport Extreme Base Station. Extremely crap, I might add. When we wanted a more robust router, my colleague - the Mac fiend - suggested Apple’s product.

Frankly, my initial thought was: music players? Ok. Phones? Maybe. TVs? Sure, why not.

But routers that double up as hard drives and quasi-servers? Give me a break. Isn’t Apple stretching itself a little too thin? What happened to Steve Jobs’ razor-sharp focus? Did greed and hubris soften that edge?

I indulged him, we got one, it was a disaster. Judging by the feedback on the Apple site, it’s a hit or miss: people love it or hate it. Judging by the ultimate feedback, I think Apple had some quality issues with a batch, because eventually when I gave my serial number to someone, they acknowledged it was, well, crappy. But more on that later…

How dare Apple—who was among the first major computer vendors to start building wireless networking into their machines—how dare they try to sell a router with all sorts of nifty functionality. Despite the fact that they’ve been selling wireless routers for almost eight years, and building servers with hard drives for even longer than that, they really should stick to shiny consumer electronics.

And the fact that Ashkan’s router turned out to be defective only reinforces that point. Because routers from Linksys never, ever go wrong. Ever. Remember: if someone tells you their Linksys router broke, that person is either a) lying to you or b) an idiot.

I made the mistake of calling the number provided on Apple’s invoice. I spoke to &$%^#$%#%^*&. No, that’s not a swear word, I could not make out the agent’s name. I figured, no worry, I am sure Apple will leave me happy as a clam.

After given a runaround tour of Apple’s circus of disservice insanity, I finally reached Steven, who, to his credit, finally spoke to a member of management. He came back to tell me that indeed, based on the serial number, they had sold me a crapbox, and that I could send it back in the next couple of days for a refund.

Did you try asking what their name was? Or have them spell it? I mean, I’m sure you’ve run into people who have difficulty with your name too, so have a little sympathy here. But I’m awfully sorry to hear that they let you send it back for a refund—wait, what?
I think this experience could illustrate that Apple has begun its long delayed descent. It’s nothing personal. It’s just the way that it is.
Wait, what? The fact that they agreed to refund you your money for a defective product tells you that they’ve begun their “long delayed descent?” You’re aware that doesn’t actually make any sense, right? You better have something more than that to go on.
Apple’s stock says a lot:

December, 2000: $8.50

April, 2003: $7.10

February, 2005: $45

April, 2007: $94

In other words, in 7 years, the company’s stock has grown tenfold on the strength of their computer sales and their digital music players, the wildly successful iPods.

…

Wait, what?

But much the same way that Microsoft (MSFT) had Windows and Office (two trick pony), Google (GOOG) had search and advertising (two trick pony) I think that deep down inside, the real and fake Steve Jobs know full well that it will take a massive hit to keep that stock rolling.
Okay, so you’re arguing that stocks are subject to the laws of gravity: what goes up must come down. I’ll admit that I don’t know much about the stock market (hence, the broker), but I’m pretty sure that the stock market doesn’t bend to the whims of Newtonian physics.
I don’t think Apple will be able to do it. John Dvorak and Peter Svensson say that they won’t do it.
Yes, John Dvorak is the very voice of reason.
I don’t really know or care if they are right, but what I do know is that due to Apple’s hubris and thinking that they can launch any product in any market and win any client, they put out a clunker and then added insult to injury by refusing to help me ship back their crapbox… translation: no Apple TV or iPhone for me, and going forward, no Mac or iPod.
Oh, so they wouldn’t help you ship it back, and you’re ticked off. I see. Yeah that’s kind of a bummer, but you’re making it out to be the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. You think they wouldn’t help you ship it back because of hubris? I’m sorry you won’t be buying any of their products, but I don’t think you’re going to singlehandedly cause Apple to spiral to its doom because of it.

Judging by the tone and handling by their service team, I’d assume I’m not alone. The shield has been broken. Apple is on the descent.

How you like them Apples, Steve?

I love that just below this, in the original article, is a graph of Apple’s stock over the last year, trending constantly upwards from $70 to $95, with peaks nearing $100. Yeah, I think Steve Jobs like those Apples just fine, thanks.


11 Comments

Gruff said:

"...the logic...is so airtight that it’s difficult to imagine why he hasn’t asphyxiated yet."

Brilliant! Can I borrow this?

April 10, 2007 9:15 AM
Peter Nordstrand said:

Haha! Great post, Dan.

April 10, 2007 9:35 AM
Tim said:

I appreciate your efforts, but is it really worth the time to rebuke (obiously planted) FUD? There are way too many crap like this on the net for our time.

On the other hand, how can people turn one personal experience into a prediction of stock market and then expect people to take them seriously?

April 10, 2007 9:52 AM
Fletcher said:

Apple's customer service does suck. It has required dozens of phone calls in some cases for us to get resolution of an issue.

Apple lost our 512MB RAM module when doing a repair on an iBook. At one point they seriously offered us a 128MB RAM module as compensation. We dealt with several reps who clearly thought their job was to annoy us enough that we never called back.

We've had better luck recently mostly because we block out several hours for each service call and try to get into a happy place before we call.

We're running an average of three service calls for each laptop we've purchased recently. The slide in quality control and the shift to selling mostly portables must be straining Apple's customer service.

April 10, 2007 9:57 AM
Thomas GvL Author Profile Page said:

Man, this guy is awesome. "If Dvorak says it, it must be true!"

I think Apple (AAPL) is going down. Microsoft (MSFT) will probably help Dell (DELL) take over the world with its cool Vista and Zune products.

April 10, 2007 10:15 AM
Robert said:

I think this guy wrote the article so he could use the phrase "How you like them Apples, Steve?"--quite witty and original, don't ya think?!?

April 10, 2007 10:33 AM
Dave said:

"Extremely crap, I might add."

Correct: Utter crap
Correct: Extremely crappy
Incorrect: "Extremely crap"

It suggests his grasp of English is worse than &$%^#$%#%^*&'s.

April 10, 2007 11:01 AM
Maddles said:

Huh, Apple support is excellent. When I bought my iPod the cable was broken and all it took was a simple email.

Same with Nintendo as well. My Wii broke and all I had to do was ring and the next day a new one arrived. All I had to do was send the old one back in the same box, all paid for by Nintendo.

April 10, 2007 1:18 PM
Chris said:

So, he views the CSR experience as poor at Apple? Has he tried the other guys at Dell, HP, etc?

As well, he's very vague with his complaints. I had issues setting up my new Apple router, but discovered that the access issues were only with my inlaws' new Vista laptops, and that OS X and even XP worked like a charm. Would his issues have been addressed by the firmware update, or perhaps his problem was but one of many Vista issues?

Finally, considering the tone of the article, I would wonder if the author might have ticked off the CSR's. Working in customer service is difficult enough, but when you have to deal with jerks, it can be a special kind of hell. Perhaps his demeanor earned him his poor service (not saying that this is right, but it must be hard to bear some one so condesending).

April 10, 2007 2:38 PM
Kalessin said:

You've gotta admire the brazen attitude of the guy who writes "&$%^#$%#%^*&" when his own name sounds like a wet sneeze.

In the original article, he responds to similar comments by claiming that he couldn't make out the agent's name because it was quiet. In fact, he blusters quite a bit, trying to twist the points in his article and comments that subsequent readers have taken issues with (at one point he claims that he used the term "fanatical" to describe Apple users as a compliment). Personally, I found it more telling to note the comments he didn't respond to.

April 11, 2007 4:17 AM
Walt Basil said:

Talk about bad CSR, my mom bought this bottom dollar Compaq (first mistake) laptop from Best Buy (second mistake) without getting the extended warranty (third mistake). It was something like $400. Imagine all the “freebie software” it takes to lower a price down to that! Anyways, it quit working. Couldn’t take it back to BB because no extended warranty. Had to call HP, but because it’s a Compaq, they get phone shifted for days between continents. The thing would not turn on at all. They managed to sell her some antivirus protection to install on it. Haha! Finally, about 3 weeks later and god knows how many phone calls, they send a box to pick it up. A few weeks later it returns, turns on, but will not boot. They take it to BB to have them look at it. Turns out it’s missing the hard drive! So instead of dealing with HP CSR again, they just pay BB to install a new HD.

April 11, 2007 7:32 AM

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