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Sunday, May 16, 2010

You’ll either hate or respect Steve Jobs a little more after this exchange.











Depending of course on your status as either PC lover—or Apple fanboy. Steve Jobs has had some good responses to users before, but this one beats them all. The thing that stands out though in this email exchange between Gawker’s Ryan Tate and iGod is that there’s a back and forth of any length at all. Worth noting in the current ignore it or pass it off to PR world CEOs live in.

It’s still the rare company leader who communicates directly with the people who reach out to them. (Off the top of my head? Mark Cuban, Tony Hsieh and... see?) Reach out, hmm, I meant, give a virtual bitchslap to. *guilty*

Customer service in 2010 means everyone with a blog and gripe is badass online—and your brand will pay. Is it any wonder then that majority of company executives high up in the food chain don’t respond?

Ironic or telling that Apple doesn’t need to promote itself online with Twitter, Facebook and so on—fanboys do it for them. As for the main points in this tête à tête offensive, Jobs nets out that hey, it’s their platform and product—they can do whatever they want—and people are free to not use it.

Tate raises legit concerns though. The gist of his Apple = Big Brother privacy argument gets deflected and then rolled up by Jobs into a tech argument about Adobe. While I get that it’s Apple’s toys and therefore, Apple’s rules, there’s something unsettling about the idea of Jobs or any CEO deciding what’s appropriate in terms of protecting my family. It’s clear Jobs believes what Apple is doing is right however, and there will be no convincing him otherwise.

iGod gets tripped up a little in the semantics of what police say happened during the search of the Gawker reporter’s home in the recent stolen lost misplaced iPhone saga. (For a fuller version of those events where nobody really comes out looking great, read this account in BusinessWeek.)

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