At a US technology conference on September 8, Apple CEO Tim Cook demonstrated forcefully — though unintentionally — that his company cares more about profit than about looking after the best interests of its customers.
An audience member at Vox Media’s Code 2022 Conference asked Cook to open Apple’s iMessage to industry messaging standard Rich Communication Services, or RCS. The standard was developed under the auspices of global mobile industry body GSMA as a protocol to replace SMS on mobile devices.
If Apple were to implement RCS, iMessage — Apple’s instant messaging software on iPhones — would have fully functional cross-platform communication with users on other platforms, including Android, the operating system developed by rival Google.
Google is a proponent of RCS, and has in recent months been actively trying to shame Apple into adopting it. But Apple has steadfastly refused to do so. As a result, iMessage users cannot send rich multimedia messages to Android users or vice versa.
iMessage is not popular in SA — the country has a relatively small base of iPhone users — and most people here, even those with Apple devices, tend to use the cross-platform WhatsApp to communicate. In the US, however, iMessage is huge, and so the inability to communicate in a “rich” way with Android users is problematic.
US publication TechCrunch wrote in a recent article: “For the uninitiated, RCS is like hyper-charged SMS that lets you send high-quality multimedia files like other chat apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram, while also providing now-standard messaging features like typing indicators, delivery and read receipts, among other things.”
Google has charged that Apple has broken texting by refusing to adopt RCS. Does it have a point? I think it does.
“I don’t hear our users asking that we put a lot of energy into that at this point,” Cook said of RCS support in iMessage. The person who had asked him about it then complained to Cook that he can’t use iMessage to send videos to his mother, who uses an Android phone, and that she can’t send any multimedia files back to him. To which the Apple CEO responded, this time laughing loudly: “Buy your mom an iPhone!”
That response was telling. Here was the CEO of Apple, the world’s most valuable technology company, arrogantly telling one of his customers that the solution to the genuine grievance he was raising was not for Apple to fix the problem (which it could do quite easily), but to spend more money on a product his mother might not even want.
Remember, Mr Cook, not everyone wants an iPhone; this notion might sound foreign to you, but many people genuinely prefer the Android experience to the iPhone.
Cook’s comments cut to the heart of a creeping arrogance at Apple: the company, while it pretends to be the consumer champion, often is not. Never has that been more glaringly obvious than in Cook’s refusal, for no good technical reason, to embrace RCS.
It’s clear as daylight that the real reason Apple shuns RCS is that the incompatibility with Android phones helps it to sell more iPhones.
Never mind that this incompatibility irritates some of its customers — what’s a little client aggravation if you can convert that into meaningful product sales?
And iPhones are big business for Apple: the company generated $365bn of revenue in 2021, 52% of this coming from iPhone sales.
Cook followed his “buy your mom an iPhone” remark with a little too much manufactured laughter (revealing a pang of conscience perhaps?). He may as well have been cackling, dollar signs in his eyes, as he told his customer to shell out for another iPhone.
Now don’t get me wrong here: I am a big fan of Apple’s products — I own several Macs (the company’s new silicon is exceptional), I have an iPad Pro and I subscribe to Apple TV+. But that doesn’t mean I’m a fan of Apple’s business practices or the casual, smug arrogance that too often comes with corporate success (Microsoft was also guilty of it under Bill Gates, which probably contributed to its antitrust tribulations in the late 1990s).
Could Apple’s arrogance be its downfall? After all, Microsoft lost its way for a decade or more after it was sued for abusing its dominance in Windows in the early days of the web.
There’s no sign of that yet. Cook, who took the reins from his mentor, Steve Jobs, in 2011, has overseen spectacular wealth creation for Apple’s shareholders. He’s achieved that by creating high-margin products that consumers desire. It’s a formula that works. But arrogance can trip up even the most successful companies — ask Microsoft or IBM.
In response to his questioner at the Code 2022 conference, who asked him how Jobs might have felt about adopting RCS in iMessage, Cook said: “He always told me not to wonder what he would have thought, just to do the right thing.”
Well, Mr Cook, when it comes to your rejection of RCS, you are absolutely not doing the right thing.
McLeod is editor of TechCentral
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