Apple is rarely on record discussing company strategy, direction or goals. They tend to let the products demonstrate what they are about. There have been a number of times that Steve Jobs (and now Tim Cook) has slipped little bits out though, and they always paraphrase down to something like:

Put the end user first.

Like so much about Apple, it is amazingly simple and impossibly complex all at the same time. It can be complex to develop around, but at retail it usually means a couple of things. Training and empowerment.

Today I was at my local Safeway, getting some items from the deli. I found a company that is going the opposite way with things. The couple in front of me in line had to leave the deli and stand in a standard cashier line because they had a case of soda and bag of chips to go with their fried chicken. They asked why they couldn’t check out here, as it was only them and me in line and the deli. I was even being helped by another employee at the time.

It’s a new corporate policy, if you have non-deli items I cannot ring you up at the deliPatient Safeway Employee

After hearing this conversation, I asked the employee helping me with my own order about it. He confirmed that this was a new policy handed down from high above. Service at the deli had experienced some number of issues with customers bringing large sets of non-deli groceries to the deli cashier. Rather than training and empower staff to handle this situation in a manner appropriate to conditions, management decided to castrate their employees and put a policy in place that will not be applicable 99% of the time.

By pushing this policy down, management has told staff “You are not capable of handling basic customer service, we do not respect you.” I can’t help but feel like this is the kind of decision made by someone that has never met their customer and does not care about developing a long standing relationship with them.

I find it very weird that I found myself thinking about Apple retails stores after this experience. I’ve seen Apple employees make horrible short term business decisions (honoring long expired warranties for example) in order to foster long term relationships. They do this because Apple trains the hell out of them and gives them the power to make those types of decisions.

Care of SFGate.com.

It’s fair to say that one of the most effective ways to respond to a threatened patent assertion is to be able to assert patents of your own.

- Tim Porter, Google Patent Council

So then the plan is to:

1. Like what the iPhone is doing
2. Do a half-ass implementation of that thing you liked
3. Shit-talk the patent system when the thing you stole gets noticed by who you stole it from
4. Get your hardware partners sued from now to the end of time

At least they don’t have a corner on anything important, like information storage, indexing, searching and presentation.

Shit.

Not long back John Gruber posted a bit of thinking surrounding the Skeuomorphic UI Textures that Apple has started using and expanding on. This piece was a response to James Higgs criticism of the same. Both Gruber and Higgs are some of the most thoughtful and insightful journalists around, but both can prone to “inside the machine” thinking. By this I mean that some folk (myself included) see design decisions like this as obscure and unneeded. We are entirely right. leather trimmed textures are stoopid. Yes, stoopid. Two O’s and zero You’s.

We don’t have leather trimmed desk blotters. We don’t carry paper and leather day planners or contact lists (didn’t they used to be phone books?). Why should our software have something our “real world” doesn’t?

I am not the target of this design. Higgs and Gruber are not either. For the target audience I must look to my Father-In-Law. 64 years young. Handle bar mustache. 30+ year veteran of the Washington State Department of Corrections, prison guard to the non-con and outsider. Also a well educated man, smart by smarts standard. He reads more in a week than I do in a month.

He won’t touch a computer.

He is afraid of them. Not evil per say, just something he feels is beyond his abilities. He does own a desk blotter and a phone book. Both leather and paper products. He owns an iPad (1st gen) too. He just “gets” the iPad.  Ask him and he will tell you “anyone with half a bean in their noodle would make a computer as simple as an iPad”.

This Skeuomorphic trend (beautiful word, skeuomorphic) is about your Father-In-Law. It is about pushing further distinction between computers and Apple’s. Computers are hard, cruel and beyond the average man. Apple’s are something else entirely. Hell, the iPad is a physical object. You interact directly with it. Zero abstraction between intent and input. A book is much the same, as is a desk blotter.

The “wrapped in leather” look represents the reality that most of the world is still afraid of computing devices. Apple solved this problem without patronizing my Father-In-Law, and without alienating the tech-forward among us.