It's March-- just about time for Apple to do something to stir up trouble, right? Everybody knows about Steve Jobs's "a surprise every 90 days" initiative; it's a great way to keep the mainstream press interested so Apple stays in the public eye. But what most people don't know is that there's also a secret strategy that's been working wonders for Apple for the past year or two-- Operation Hornet's Nest. The idea is to alienate the living bejeezus out of Apple's loyal installed base, and then "do the right thing" just before the villagers storm the citadel with pitchforks and torches. To the best of our knowledge, the original iMac modem specification was an early test-run of this plan; Apple announced that the iMac would ship with a 33.6 kbps modem, lots and lots of Macfolk complained, and by the time the iMac actually reached store shelves, the company was able to trumpet that it had listened to its customers and switched to a 56K modem instead.

The early success of the iMac modem fracas (and its developer-targeted original inspiration, the QuickTime 3 licensing hullaballoo of early 1998) has since led Apple to pull all kinds of nonsense specifically designed to raise the hackles of various segments of the Mac community. Remember the Blue Blocker scandal? Apple alienated thousands of blue-and-white Power Mac G3 owners by issuing a firmware update that secretly rendered G3 systems incapable of using G4 upgrade cards. Eventually the uproar started to fade when third-party upgrade manufacturers "discovered" ways around the problem. What you may not realize is that Apple itself leaked the key to circumventing the firmware block; Blue Blocker was engineered to generate controversy, and nothing more.

Then there was that whole G4 Speed Dump goofiness. It's crazy enough that any company could seriously consider slowing down its entire line of professional computers while keeping prices the same... but to cancel all existing orders for the systems, too, forcing customers to reorder at the higher prices? Absurd. No company would ever do that-- unless the plan was simply to generate a ton of controversy by alienating all those G4 early adopters. Within a week, Apple issued an apology and reinstated those orders, and all was well. Sensing a pattern yet? Apparent boneheaded move, followed by an overt or behind-the-scenes rectification of said issue after the fur flies in the Macintosh-oriented and general media? After all, there's no such thing as bad press.

Anyway, it seems that this time around, Apple's working hard to alienate AppleWorks users. A mere glance at the bile issuing forth from MacInTouch's Reader Report on the just-released AppleWorks 6 unveils a treasure trove of trouble some people are calling "AppleWorks Sux." Among the complaints are hideous slowdowns, nasty crashes, a butchered interface (shades of Aqua, anyone?), far too few new features to justify the $79 price tag, and no upgrade pricing for those who already own a previous version of the software. And get this-- they removed the file translators that enabled AppleWorks 5 to read and write Office files, etc. Right on schedule! Now let's see how long Apple strings us all along before an AppleWorks 6.0.1 release and a revised pricing structure makes everyone happy again. Er, this was intentional, wasn't it, folks?...