Is Apple Taking Customer Loyalty For Granted?

Over at Slate, tech writer Farhad Manjoo enumerates the missteps made by Apple in the past few months and asks:

Why don't consumers seem to care about Apple's problems?

In part, Manjoo writes, it's because the company has worked hard to construct its thick teflon coating:

Years of savvy brand advertising and a string of genuinely great products have helped Apple build up a well of good-feeling; as a result, people are more willing to overlook the company's occasional failures.

Further, many of these people also are more than willing to vigorously and publicly defend Apple's honor against the haters, dolts and Windows whores who dare criticize the House That Jobs Built, as anyone who has ever printed anything negative about Apple or its products can attest.

Given this level of loyalty, Manjoo thinks Apple's grudging response to complaints about its products and services is bad business, if not yet bad for business:

[W]hen it does screw up, [Apple] prefers secrecy over full disclosure, and it expects customers to quickly forgive any slight. Its response to the MobileMe meltdown was a classic example. For several days after the site's rocky launch, Apple refused to disclose what had gone wrong. It wouldn't say why MobileMe was down, and it wouldn't say when MobileMe would be fixed. Only after the New York Times' David Pogue and the Wall Street Journal's Walter Mossberg published critical columns did Apple change its tune. ...

Apple is dealing with iPhone problems in much the same way -- grudgingly. Apple-focused blogs recently reported that Jobs fired off one-line e-mail replies to two different customers upset about iPhone difficulties; in each case, he said Apple was working on the problems.

Of course, it's worth pointing out that not many CEOs of major corporations would personally respond to a complaint from a retail customer. And it wasn't even a "What do you mean, problems, you ingrate?" kind of email. It was short and polite.

The bottom line, Manjoo writes, is that Apple's market share and customer base is growing "beyond longtime Mac fanatics -- people who give the company a pass because they regard it as an underdog." No doubt. The thing is, though, Apple's new customers will expect the company's products to be as great and stupendous as their overbearing Apple-user friends have been telling them they are for years. And when things go wrong, they may not be so forgiving.