This is a rant.

Meet the disgruntled customer:

We’ll call her, oh, let’s say, Katherine. Katherine sees the infinitely shiny and appealing new application store on iTunes. Katherine wants. Katherine eagerly downloads applications and proceeds to cry a bucket of invisible tears when she realizes that she must wait (oh no) a whole ten hours for Apple to release iPhone software 2.0 (the worst sort of tease).

Katherine eagerly goes to sleep, wakes up, and, lo and behold, the infinitely shinier and OMG1!1!! iPhone 2.0 update is available! She plugs her iPhone in and clicks ‘check update’ followed by ‘download and install.’ Fail. She tries again: more fail. Katherine is a little distressed, but she perseveres. Everything now insists Katherine has the latest update (which is NOT 2.0), so Katherine unplugs and reconnects her iPhone to the computer, and tries again, only clicking ‘download’ instead of install. At last the sparkly new update downloads! But then it does not install, and mysteriously disappears from her hard drive. Katherine tries downloading the software again and updating.

Uh-oh. What. NO. NO. MY BABY. WHAT DO YOU MEAN ERROR, APPLE?!

Katherine tries doing a restore (because the iPhone still thinks it has the latest version of its OS system). All seems to be going well, it’s been restored, the firmware is updating–error. Katherine’s phone can’t find the iTunes store.

Katherine’s phone has NO OS, no contacts, no ANYTHING. Katherine effectively has no phone.

Dear Steve Jobs,Thanks for your extremely unshiny update that has just Black Plague’d my means of communication with the outside world to death. I really wanted to spend my entire morning trying to clean up your aftermath.  I’ll use my iPhone as a doorstop, because that is about all it is useful for, and it even stinks at doing that because it’s too small.

Sincerely,
Katherine

What have we learned from this? (Besides the fact that not all updates are shiny, and being technologically at the front of the line is not always worth it.) If your business deals in technology, you better make it easy for your old customers to update. Do NOT force them to connect to your ONLINE STORE in order to activate the update: I guarantee you that your bandwidth cannot handle it unless you have under 10 customers. (This is made more frustrating by the fact that I can access the iTunes store via iTunes–but apparently not with my phone? What?) Not everyone buys the new and shiny things right away.

Barry says to be there when your customers are ready to buy. Katherine says to be there when they’re ready to update with something that WORKS, and if it doesn’t, send an update–if you have no problem sending me 3726 emails about the iPhone 3G (or *insert shiny new product here*), how about one apologizing for messing up, or one that says ‘we’ll have everything up and running in an hour, your updates will occur then.’ Just because you are a large corporation with many customers does not mean you can ignore your old customers (unless, of course, it’s a plot to make us all fed up and buy the new product, in which case, all hail capitalism at its finest). But don’t just give me error messages and direct me to support pages, I want to know WHY you have failed to provide me the service I paid for. Communication is important.

Being there when they want to throw bricks (better known as useless phones) at your head, is, of course, up to you.

Ah, edit: Apple fails to provide because they didn’t learn from their failure last year. Barry says that there isn’t always something to learn from failure–let’s all remember to always make sure that there isn’t.