Apple listens harder to its customers than anyone else

by seyed mostafa zamani

Another myth bites the dust: How Apple listens to its customers
[Via MacDailyNews]

“Yesterday I pointed to five dangerous myths about Steve Jobs,” Steve Denning writes for Forbes. “Here’s another one. Apple doesn’t listen to its customers.”

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The Forbes article is important, delineating how apple has used its retail stores to gain an understanding of its customers to a degree no other company has.

They learned to work hard with those who complained, finding out that every hour they spent resulted in $1000 of sales. They know how every store is connecting with its customers and how Apple itself is doing.

The retail stores are not just to sell things, as so many other companies do retail. It is a place for Apple to get its customers to congregate and where it can then learn from them.

They turned this on their own employees identifying those who were the best fans for its products.

This point is right on:

Thus Apple practices radical management, where making money is the result, not the goal of the organization. The bottom line of its business is to delight the customer.

As long as it delights its customers it will make money. Too many companies think it is the other way around, somehow.

HP, Samsung, Motorola and even MS spend no time on trying to delight their customers or even on how to do it. They just try and make money.

 

My new addiction – Zombie Gunship

I’ve really gotten hooked on this relatively simple game – Zombie Gunship.

You are flying around in a C-130 gunship trying to protect a bunker where humans survivors of the Zombie Apocalypse are running. What you see is a gray-scale image as though it was using heat sensing technology. Humans are these little white running figures – they are hot – and zombies are slower moving black ones – they are not.

Your gunship circles the bunker and you target the zombies with one of three different weapons – weapons that you gain and can modify as you get more experience.

Here is an example of the gameplay:

The sound effects are what make this. There is the constant noise of the propellors at all time. When you do something great, you hear it from Central Command. Kill too many civilians and you get called back to base.

You can get pretty pinpoint with some of the weapons and upgrades give you better accuracy, rapid fire, better radar, etc. I’ve got the 105 mm gun now and it is simply amazing.

I’ll be playing this for a while.

A phishing scheme for Macs

Watch Out! Email Phishing Tricks You With iCloud Appeal [Scams]
[Via Cult of Mac]

A particularly nasty phishing scam is making the rounds, according to MacRumors. Why is it so nasty, you ask? Because the email is designed to trick you into upgrading your existing MobileMe account to iCloud. 

“A number of MacRumors readers have reported today receiving a phishing email designed to look like a notice from Apple asking users to upgrade their MobileMe accounts to iCloud. The email is patterned after one sent to MobileMe members in early June just after Apple introduced iCloud at its Worldwide Developers Conference.”

Clicking the “iCLOUD” link takes you to a very fake (but cleverly constructed) phishing page where you enter in your personal billing information to “upgrade” to iCloud. In case you didn’t know, iCloud hasn’t been launched to the public yet.

This email scam is a whole lot like the iPhone 5 messages that were circulating awhile ago. It’s important to be wary of scams, and we’re sure that most of our astute readership will have no trouble recognizing this round of fakery. Just wanted to pass the news along.

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Luckily it has a word misspelled. This is a pretty good looking email. One reason you should always make sure that the URL for any links you click actually goes someplace you know.

Excel spreadsheet plus Flash cause for security breach

Security researchers trace RSA hack and SecureID breach to lame Excel spreadsheet phishing
[Via Boing Boing]

F-Secure found the file that was used to hack RSA and compromise the SecureID system. Kim Zetter of Wired News has more here.

This week Finnish security company F-Secure discovered that the file had been under their noses all along. Someone — the company assumes it was an employee of RSA or its parent firm, EMC — had uploaded the malware to an online virus scanning site back on March 19, a little over two weeks after RSA is believed to have been breached on March 3. The online scanner, VirusTotal, shares malware samples it receives with security vendors and malware researchers.

RSA had already revealed that it had been breached after attackers sent two different targeted phishing e-mails to four workers at its parent company EMC. The e-mails contained a malicious attachment that was identified in the subject line as “2011 Recruitment plan.xls.”

None of the recipients were people who would normally be considered high-profile or high-value targets, such as an executive or an IT administrator with special network privileges. But that didn’t matter. When one of the four recipients clicked on the attachment, the attachment used a zero-day exploit targeting a vulnerability in Adobe Flash to drop another malicious file — a backdoor — onto the recipient’s desktop computer. This gave the attackers a foothold to burrow farther into the network and gain the access they needed.

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They made it look like the email came from a jobs site and sent it to people at the company to read.

Interestingly, anyone who had any sense of security should have been worried about anExcel spreadsheet they had opened from an unknown source that had nothing in it.

I wonder if the same thing would have worked on Mac OS X or only on a Windows computer. How in the world can either Excel or Flash allow such a thing to occur?

Makes me kind of hope that Apple’s goal of removing Flash actually succeeds.

Remembering the management style of Steve Jobs

There have been a lot of nice anecdotes about Steve Jobs recently. And deservedly so as he has had an impact on a lot of people.

Back in April I wrote a little bit about the way Jobs’ management style played out in one instance. One thing I wrote should be on everyone’s minds when they think about Jobs because i think it encompasses  a really strong message, one I have seen again and again with other people whose management style is called abrasive:

Jobs’ methods may be abrasive but there is a point. The types of individuals that Jobs is looking for – those who can creatively connected to the single vision needed for success and who are adaptable enough to make that vision a reality –  do not respond to his manner by trying to hide in committees. They stand right up, against all outside pressure, and try to find a solution.

And that is why they succeed.

Not a management style for everyone but it seems to have succeeded in creating a cohesive group of brave leaders who have internalized what will be needed to move forward. That may be more important than all the technologies he has been a part of mainstreaming.