Gane.ca

It often doesn't take long for a business to feel some backlash from its own success, two examples of this are Apple and Facebook. It is often a fine line one walks and talks about the success they've incurred, and they risk alienating the people that made them the success, in these cases the users.

"Success makes so many people hate you. I wish it wasn't that way. It would be wonderful to enjoy success without seeing envy in the eyes of those around you." — Marilyn Monroe

Apple

For the past decade Apple could seemingly do no wrong, especially when compared to Microsoft, who was often seen as the giant who wasn't playing clean pool. They've had some major successes with the iPad, iPhone and by all intents and purposes the iPad (however tragically named). Blog upon blog exist for the sole purpose of writing about Apple and it's products, and the mainstream media coverage is often less then unbiased.

And still, the tide is clearly changing, and Apple is faced with allegations of stodginess, overly secretive, overbearingness, being mean-spirited and even being uncool.

What has caused this?

Well, it is hard to pinpoint any one thing. Could it be the Mac VS PC commercials that were funny at one point, but eventually became annoying, self indulgent and often mean and misleading? Could it be the closed system they've released they're products on and how they treat tinkerers who've jail broken they're iPhones?

Need more? How about removing apps from it's app store, because it doesn't like the way they were developed? Or censorship that has led a fashion magazine to bud it censored iPad version the "Iran Edition"? Or when it asked the cops to raid the house of a blogger who wrote about an unreleased product?

To be fair, I am not an Apple fan-boy. However, I often find those Apple fan-boys to be pretentious snobs who looks down on me for using Windows or Linux, having a Blackberry instead of an iPhone and liking Google. At the end of the day, I think that attitude of self assurance, and superiority of the loyal fan base is one of the core issues. At least in my mind.

Facebook

I heard a great one the other day, Facebook is transforming like the Galactic Senate did to the Imperial Empire in Star Wars. Sigh, it made me laugh. Although, in all seriousness, the march towards a more open Facebook has been steady from some time now. One only has too look at the graphs from Matt McKeon to see how the Privacy setting by default have changed so much.

Facebook's attitude towards privacy has been thoroughly documented. With people finding reasons upon reasons to end there Facebook profiles, or using fake data to keep the real data safe. Even recently the query for "How Do I Delete My Facebook Account" became a hot search topic.

So why is Facebook moving to a more open platform? With initiatives like Open Graph and other Plugins for websites. Theories exist why these moves have occurred, and the ones I agree with end with greed. If they are doing this for an IPO or just to open up your data to advertisers, at the end of the day, they're doing this all for the dollar.

Isn't this why MySpace failed? Privacy is one of the major reasons I never jumped onto MySpace. And it seems that it is going to be what drives me off of Facebook at some point. And I am not alone in this, as I know several dozen people who have deleted accounts because of privacy concerns.

The End

Is it too late for Apple to avoid becoming the next Microsoft? Or for Facebook to prevent losing droves of users because of privacy concerns? No, and even if they get to that point, anyone could recover. But they are on a slippery slope, no doubt about that.