What do you make of a company where the CEO deal directly with customers? And we are talking here about ordinary customers, not necessarily the big ones. We are talking here about Steve Job and Apple.
It's a point examined by economics professor Joshua Gans in the Harvard Business Review.
Gans cites these emails from ordinary customers to Jobs:
"Q: I've been a massive fan of the original Apple TV since it launched, in fact I have 2 of my own and have bought a fair few as gifts over the years. So as soon as the new Apple TV was released I bought one. Overall it's a fantastic update for me as I always stream from my Mac mini anyway. But here's the kicker – Where are iTunes Extras and iTunes LP gone? I've purposely been buying content with those features just for my Apple TVs. And now the features are unusable on my new box?! Is there an update coming to fix this?
A: Coming.
Sent from my iPhone."
You can read more of them at emailsfromstevejobs.com.
Jobs only responds to emails that are short and to the point, from people who actually want answers. And there is every chance that someone at Apple is sifting through the emails to identify key issues.
As Gans says, it's a whole different business model and strategy. "Put simply, this is another way of crowd-sourcing customer feedback. In an age where the flow of information to large corporations might be overwhelming and noisy, it creates incentives for obtaining higher quality and timely information. For some corporations, a twitter account is playing this role. For Apple, the CEO is an active part of the game."
no comment untill now