When he introduced Apple's new Pro Mouse to the world last week, Steve tried to drive home one point: Apple listens to its customers. People complained about the old mouse, Apple listened, and a mere two years later, the problem's been fixed. Piece of cake, right? Points for effort, if not necessarily for speed. And there have indeed been plenty of other instances in which we've seen Apple listen to its customers and fix a problem. Witness the original iMac shipping with a 56K modem instead of a 33.6 one. Witness the reinstatement of the G4 orders cancelled after the "Speed Dump". Witness the availability of a six-slot Power Ma-- uh, never mind.

But how will Apple listen if there's no way for customers to yell? That's the concern voiced by Mac OS Rumors, who notes that Apple has finally discontinued the long-standing leadership@apple.com email address. Now, we can only assume that leadership@apple.com's deletion was a simple mistake, since advice from random individuals on how to run Apple is obviously the only thing that brought Apple through its dark days. Worse yet, Apple's web site doesn't provide any clue as to how a concerned customer can tell Apple what Steve's doing right and what's he's doing wrong; the Contact page only allows web site feedback, instead of feedback on Apple's leadership strategies.

Indeed, MOSR notes that "one can send such feedback through the Website Feedback pages, but that clearly won't be routed to decision-makers." Because, as we all know, before it vanished, leadership@apple.com was checked by Steve Jobs every five minutes, and he took care to read each and every single one of the hundreds of email messages sent to that account every day. Sure, he's a busy guy, what with running two companies and still maintaining a family life, but that advice from bobby@mertz.k12.state.ia.us about how Apple should "kick dells ass, and also imacs should have pokemon on them" was far too valuable a piece of advice to risk missing.

The only other possibility is that Steve thinks he's doing a decent job of directing Apple on his own, and that Amelio's "tell us how we should run Apple" email address (which some incurable pessimists suspect was always routed to /dev/null anyway) was just a bozo ploy to fool the masses into thinking their thoughts were actually being considered in the matter. But that couldn't be the case, could it? That said, we'd love to see Apple institute an easy method by which customers can voice their likes and dislikes about specific products they've used. Maybe we'll suggest it in a message to leadersh-- Oh.