Apple's Fickleness Reflects On Us

Word to the wise: if Apple were your wing man, it would steal your girl. If you were going steady with Apple, it would fool around with your worst enemy. When Apple's back is against the wall, it throws its friends under the bus.

Apple is likely to pull the rug out from under AT&T's exclusive iPhone arrangement, marking yet another decline in the company's increasingly unethical and narcissistic corporate culture.

• News today is that Apple is going to start dating Verizon, whether AT&T likes it or not. Objectively, it could be the right decision (there's an awful lot of pressure coming from the FCC, among other quarters, to drop the "going steady" part of their relationship), but it's not what a true friend would do;
• Apple didn't hesitate to cut former BFF Google off at the knees when it came to Google Voice;
• Apple let AT&T twist in the wind when it was suggested the carrier was responsible for the decision to pull the Google Voice app from the iPhone;
• Apple has a history of switching carriers abroad, most notably in France. AppleInsider quotes Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster as writing that

For various reasons the company moved from an exclusive relationship with French wireless carrier Orange to a multi-carrier model... In France, the company now enjoys dramatically higher market share... than in countries with exclusive carrier agreements (such as AT&T in the U.S. where the iPhone has market share in the mid-teens).

• After rejecting other apps that compete with its music service, Apple changed course where Spotify is concerned because it would have brought even more pressure upon itself, and a possible EU investigation, if it had rejected it;
• As my colleague Erik Sherman has noted, Apple is like someone who dumps their long-time spouse for a trophy wife, turning on its customers when they displease it.

Forgive me if personalizing things this way seems puerile, but I'm trying to make a larger point about Apple's business. Apple is the personification of the ethos enunciated by Michael Corleone: "it's not personal. It's strictly business."

"It's business, not personal" seems to have permeated our culture, so it's fitting that Apple, the purest reflection of our consumer culture, should embody it most vividly. But the Michael Corleone character was a gangster. Putting business ahead of qualities like loyalty and honesty is bankrupt in every sense of the word. Putting business ahead of doing the right thing, failing to consider the long-term effects of any action, is exactly what caused the current economic collapse; it's what's made it possible for two generations of business executives to rationalize shipping jobs overseas, pay scab labor, destroy the environment and generally strip-mine the communities where they do business.

It's business, not personal, is even more pernicious than "greed... is good" because greed could in some cases be put to good use. Taking the personal out of business can't be put to any good use.
It will be interesting to see whether legions of its fans turn on the increasingly despicable Apple culture and its supercilious, imperious leader, Steve Jobs.

[Image source: Wikimedia Commons]