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Leaning On The Man (5/27/99)
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Who says Apple never listens to its customers? Okay, sure, sometimes things have to get ugly before they start paying attention, but when they make a particularly boneheaded move, it seems like these days they're much more likely to admit the mistake and make amends. Remember last year's fracas when they revamped the QuickTime 3 licensing terms? They eventually changed things around after massive developer protest. And more recently, they modified their public source license in response to feedback from the Open Source community. If you want to look larger, you could even consider the whole Carbon API thingy to be a response to developer reluctance to port to Yellow Box. Apple does listen-- at least, better than they once did.
The latest case in point? AppleShare IP. By now you're probably privy to the outrage following Apple's announcement that version 6.2 of the excellent cross-platform file-, web-, email-, and print-serving software suite would cost people $499-- even though it was primarily a bug-fix upgrade. What ensued was basically the online equivalent of the villagers grabbing lots of torches, pitchforks, and those rake-things from the old Frankenstein movies and storming the castle. It was not a pretty sight.
So we were happy to see that last night, Apple officially posted the ASIP 6.2 updater as a free, 20 MB download for owners of any previous ASIP 6.x version. They "done right" by the user community, and faithful viewer Todd Wheeler forwarded us an excerpt from the email sent by Apple's marketing veep Phil Schiller to the ASIP mailing list: "...We have received strong feedback from a number of our loyal AppleShare IP 6 customers about the need to provide this latest release of AppleShare IP to them at a more affordable price than the $499 upgrade that has been announced. They are absolutely right... Apple's customers are considered by many to be the most loyal and passionate in the industry. We love to listen to them, learn from them, and respond quickly when they provide advice..." So there you have it: another victory for everyone involved. Aren't happy endings great?
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SceneLink (1565)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 5/27/99 episode: May 27, 1999: Apple caves to pressure from its "loyal and passionate" AppleShare IP customers, and cuts the price of the 6.2 upgrade from $499 to $0. Meanwhile, Sears seems bent on going in the other direction and selling the iMac for a hundred dollar more than list price, and something very strange has happened to one of Apple's QuickTime streams...
Other scenes from that episode: 1566: Right Mac, Wrong Price (5/27/99) Uh-oh-- you may want to prepare for a rocky kick-off to the whole iMac era at Sears. Following early reports that iMacs had already surfaced in a couple of Sears stores, your AtAT crew took a trip down to the local mall to see what was up... 1567: Ghost In The Machine (5/27/99) As much as we love following the day-to-day drama of Apple Computer, we can't help but feel that recently things just haven't been nearly as surreal as we'd like. There haven't been as many bizarre occurrences to stop us in our tracks and make us go, "Huh."...
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