Lawsuits and Listening to Customers
So Apple is nowsilently including a casewith the iPod nano. This is undoubtedly a reaction to the class action lawsuits being brought against them for how easily the nano scratches.
Apple’s constant stonewalling of customers has been a frustration of mine for quite some time. In the past, Apple could safely deny issues because customers had no real way of getting a hold of one another. Apple would call it a few isolated instances, blow it off, and for the most part get away with it. There were lawsuits, but they were few and far between, and usually were brought years after the original issue surfaced.
Well, no more. The power of blogs, which Apple really really hates, has connected their dissatisfied customers and those customers are making Apple listen. Now we have a class action suit because Apple didn’t think it was a big deal, and refused to listen to customers who obviously thought it was a big deal. Walt freakin’ Mossberg thought it was a big deal, but Apple still stonewalled.
Some may say a class action lawsuit is only going to benefit the lawyers, not the customers with scratched nanos. That may be the case in the short term, but in the long term, Apple is finally learning that they need to listen to their customer’s problems and react to them in a way that makes the customer feel heard and respected instead of minimizing their issues and dismissing them as crazy.
