How Not to Manage your Corporate Reputation: Apple MacBook Pro Crashes

My wife recently bought one of the very cool Apple MacBook Pro's. She had a Macintosh before, but this was her first laptop and she was ecstatic with the computer and the ability to work outside on the deck. It wasn't long, however, before things started turning sour. She started seeing crashes when she was surfing wirelessly. They weren't just 'restart Firefox' crashes. They were nasty 'the cursor won't even move and you have to power down the whole laptop and loose everything' crashes.

My wife called AppleCare and they had her try a number of things that didn't resolve the problem. In the meantime we started doing Internet searches and going through Apple's discussion forums. We looked at many discussions and found a thread that exactly described our problem. It was filled with many angry people with the same problem. While a fix isn't yet out, it looks like the problem has been isolated to a driver problem with the integrated wireless in the new Santa Rosa generation MacBook Pros. The problem occurs when using the laptop with third party wireless routers when wireless encryption is turned on (generally WPA). Ironically, the same laptops work perfectly when running Windows in Boot Camp. Apparently the fix is in testing and should be released shortly.

While it isn't good that the problem completely crashes the laptop, I understand the difficultly in catching and resolving driver issues when the hardware keeps changing and the problem only appears when working with third party routers. I do think, however, that this is a case study in how not to manage your corporate reputation.

Here was a thread on Apple's own discussion board. It has 708 replies and had been viewed 24,700 times! At the same time, no one at Apple made a single reply to the discussion. The posters' frustration was palpable and growing by the day. Apple's support was replacing computers, but since the problem is a software driver, people were sometimes on their third laptop and still having the same problem. Some posters openly talked about being disillusioned with Apple and returning to Windows Vista laptops which they described as crashing much less frequently. Beyond these very public discussion forums, the problem moved out into the blogosphere. One blogger posted each step of trying to resolve the problem in his blog with it ending up with him returning the Mac and getting a Lenovo Windows laptop. The story has also reached Digg. All of this leaves a stain on Apple's reputation as being the the more stable alternative to Windows. All of this content will be floating through the Internet for years to come for people to find. Already posters said they were about to buy a MacBook Pro and didn't because they found this thread. All of this happened without a word from Apple.

In today's Internet this content is constantly indexed and bloggers bring these issues to light. A policy of ignoring the problem publicly does much more harm than good for the company.

Imagine if Apple had employees reading through the discussion boards and external blogs for serious problems. They could have reported the issue with the engineering department to make sure they were aware of it and get a status update. They could have then posted in the forums or other areas where it is being discussed. Just a message saying 'We are getting reports on the problem and checking into it', followed later by a post saying 'It's a driver issue. We are working on a fix and should have it out soon' would have made a huge difference. It has been the silence of Apple that has been driving people away. As new people reported this problem on the Internet, others who followed the thread would tell them 'Hang on. A batch is coming.' Apple would also have to deal with fewer returned laptops as people would wait for the patch. The whole tone of the discussion would change a much more positive one. In the future as people come across this content, they would also see Apple's quick and positive response.

As is the case so often, it's not whether you have a problem. It's how you handle the problem that makes all of the difference.