Apple's CEO Steve Jobs videoconferences with senior designer Jonathan Ive, in a demonstration at WWDC 2010. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
Slow and meticulous is how Apple generally approaches product design, and it’s also how it handles crisis management. The company doesn’t rush, so that it can get things right the first time.
But when it comes to responding to crises, being slow hasn’t always been the best idea for Apple.
Macworld editorial director Jason Snell published a peculiar but intriguing piece Friday, analyzing how Apple handles crisis management. He notes that the way Apple responds has a clear pattern: The company takes its time to react with care and with a lot of detail. This is illustrated by the past week’s iPhone location-collection controversy and last year’s “Antennagate” debacle.
This technique seems idiosyncratic to some crisis-management experts, who believe companies should respond much faster in the event of a crisis.
“We live in a world that’s measured in seconds,” said Michael Robinson, senior VP with Levick Strategic Communications, a firm that helps companies deal with public relations emergencies, in an interview with Computerworld. “Companies grow and go away in that time. If it takes a week, it might as well take a month.””
Apple isn’t the only big corporation that takes its sweet time to respond to concerns. Sony, too, took over a week to acknowledge and publicize a massive security breach that resulted in hackers potentially stealing personal information, including credit card data, from millions of PlayStation Network customer accounts.
Data researchers revealed April 20 that an unprotected file inside iOS devices stores location data, dating as far back as 10 months. The file stores information about nearby cell towers and Wi-Fi access points, leaving a digital trail of your general whereabouts.
Apple waited an entire week to publish its response to the location-data collection discussion in the form of a Q&A, explaining that the company had made some mistakes. And when asked why, Steve Jobs defended the company’s decision to wait:
“By the time we had figured this all out, it took a few days,” Jobs told All Things Digital. “Then writing it up and trying to make it intelligible when this is a very high-tech topic took a few days. And here we are less than a week later.”
During last year’s iPhone 4 antenna controversy, in which some customers reported that holding the iPhone in a very natural way caused signal loss, Jobs made a similar statement to explain Apple’s slow response.
“We heard about [reception problems] 22 days ago and have been working our butts off. It’s not like we’ve had our heads in the sand for three months,” he said during a press conference.
In both these scenarios, Apple’s slow and calculated response to crises seemed to address the issues effectively, although later than some critics would have liked.
Snell argues that in the case of Antennagate, Apple’s idiosyncratic crisis management didn’t seem to do Apple any harm, as shown by skyrocketing sales of the iPhone 4 despite the controversy. Therefore Apple will probably go unharmed with the location-data fiasco, too.
“I’m not convinced that Apple’s been given any reason to believe that its approach to crisis management is wrong,” Snell writes.
But it’s worth noting that in another major “crisis,” Apple’s slow-to-respond M.O. didn’t bode well.
How Apple Fumbled ‘MobileMess’
Think back to the debut of MobileMe, Apple’s $100-per-year online service for e-mails, calendars and contacts.
MobileMe was riddled with bugs and glitches when it launched in 2008. Then things got worse. There was an outage that left 1 percent of MobileMe customers (20,000 people) without e-mail for weeks. Some reported temporarily losing thousands of their e-mail messages due to the glitch.
Even if that was just a small portion of MobileMe customers, an e-mail outage is a serious problem, especially when it’s a paid service. You could miss important notes related to job offers, family members and friends.
During the MobileMe debacle, which critics dubbed “MobileMess,” Apple didn’t respond to queries from press. And for customers, it issued a vague statement acknowledging the problem, but gave no clear estimate of when the problem would be fixed.
It was the same slow and cautious crisis-management technique that we saw again this week, but with a different outcome.
Throughout the weeks of e-mail blackout, there weren’t regular updates assuring customers of what was happening, each step of the way. The only status update from Apple was, “We understand this is a serious issue and apologize for this service interruption. We are working hard to restore your service.”
But by the time the problem was fixed, it was too late. MobileMe’s brand was damaged forever. And the consensus among technology writers, and even Steve Jobs, was that MobileMe was “not up to Apple’s standards.”
“It’s amazing that Apple doesn’t recognize this situation,” New York Times columnist David Pogue wrote on the “MobileMess” debacle in 2008:
This is an airplane that’s stuck on the runway for hours with no food or working bathroom. And the pilot doesn’t come on the P.A. system to tell the customers what the problem is, what’s being done to fix it, how much longer they might be stuck, and how he empathizes with their plight. Instead, he comes on once every three hours to repeat the same thing: “We apologize for the inconvenience.”
The difference between MobileMe and the location controversy? In the case of MobileMe, customers affected by early bugs and the e-mail outage were the ones demanding answers. They didn’t get the attention they needed from Apple, and for many, MobileMe could no longer be trusted.
In the case of the location-collection controversy, it was mostly the media and some senators demanding transparency from Apple, not thousands of customers complaining, and so, Apple will probably continue selling millions of iPhones anyway.
Customers Deserve a Quicker Response
While Apple’s late response to the location controversy was indeed effective, I’m not convinced this was the best way to handle the situation. Customers, not just journalists, deserve to have an idea of what’s going on with their products sooner.
If its explanation is to be fully believed, Apple had to know that it was a mistake to store a year’s worth of geodata on iPhones the minute it took a look at the file. It could have defused the situation sooner by acknowledging that there was an error, while promising that it was working on a full explanation and a fix to come later.
Apple even had a prefabricated response waiting for it. When asked, Apple could have pointed journalists to a letter its general counsel penned almost one year ago disclosing the iPhone’s location-data methods to Congressman Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts). Most of what appeared in Apple’s Q&A this week was already buried inside that year-old legal letter.
Finally, the only reason the location issue ever came to light was that Apple’s security team simply didn’t respond to questions from the two data scientists who originally published a story on the issue: “We’ve contacted Apple’s Product Security team, but we haven’t heard back,” they wrote.
A slow and thorough response to a crisis can work for Apple, but with the location-tracking controversy, the issue could have been avoided altogether with a single response.
As it turned out, the location-tracking issue was not an immediate or huge concern. But in the future, Apple might not be so lucky if its mistakes prove to be more serious. The company should reevaluate its crisis-management technique before it gets into another MobileMess.
