I stumbled upon this site by David Hudd while looking up some of Bridget Riley's excellent art today.
It is a site for disgruntled users of Apple PowerBooks with faulty screens to post their grievances in spite of Apple's efforts at censoring these complaints on their official sites.
"Apple constantly close down, lock or delete any threads containing manufactoring[sic] information, photographs or links to external sites discussing this problem on their forums!"
"...they are aware of a known defect, do not want to address it and are scared of the bad publicity that would result..."
"Apple's blatant censorship and refusal to address this problem [is] unpalatable..."
Reading this brings back to mind my own battles with Apple years ago over my first and last Powerbook.
Apple may well be creative and innovative in their product design development. Behaviour like these do seem to point to a rather more "conservative" approach to their PR and customer relationship activities. Deleting genuine posts made by frustrated loyal users is about as rude as you can get - tantamount to in-your-face denial. I fail to see how this can possible help Apple's cause.
It would have been more honest to step up to the mark and say "hey, we know there's a problem, and here's what we are doing about it." Sure, some customers will still be unhappy. But I reckon they would have lost less loyalty overall that way.
Incidentally, the potential impact of negative blog postings on companies in China is significant enough to warrant the existence of services that trawl the blogosphere for negative comments so as to get these companies to fix any potential customer relationship issues before the comments pick up critical mass. See this BusinessWeek article Inside the War Against China's Blogs.
