Yesterday, Apple, Inc. posted record sales and profit numbers, surprising most analysts. Much of the credit for this success is attributed to the new, larger format iPhones. Normally, someone late to a party (Samsung has been making larger screen devices for a while now) might not be expected to be so successful. But, as Jim Morrison and the Doors noted, the Twentieth Century Fox was “fashionably lean and fashionably late,” and this suggests that, if you’re a star and you do it right, late to the party isn’t always a bad thing.
As I often do when certain things hit the news (e.g. any story about Apple, any column by Karl Rove), I peruse the comments sections of various news sites for the inevitable derogatory comments. I found them, of course. And, of course, they’re a combination of blanket denigrations of the company itself and the “iSheep,” as one poster called them, who have been suckered into buying Apple products. Setting aside those who dishonestly knock Apple simply because they have financial interest in Android or Blackberry, we find several types of “haters” wandering the internet. Some simply like being contrarian, some think they have greater understanding of deep truths than the masses, some are loyal to their chosen product and are angry that the market might be telling them they chose wrong, and some choose to find a particular fault with a particular Apple product and translate that into “anyone who buys Apple is stupid.”
The last are particularly fascinating. Consumers today are offered an enormous range of choices among countless goods and services, and the existence of this enormous range tells us that different people have different interests, preferences and priorities. Yet, someone who believes that a Samsung Galaxy S5 running the Android operating system better suits his needs and preferences than an iPhone 6 or 6+ does may ignore the fact that others have different needs and preferences, and simply declare that anyone who doesn’t make the choice he has is wrong, stupid or somehow mesmerized by slick marketing. And, he may believe in this declaration so strongly that he needs to go onto message boards and comments pages to share it with the world. What’s to be gained? Are others going to be enlightened by “the only people who keep buying apple products now are old people and dumb hipsters” or “They have the world in a trance” or “Steve jobs greatest contribution was how to be a great snake oil salesman and get people to worship you” (to pull but three quotes of many at WSJ.com)?
It’s far more likely that the hater does what he does simply to assert superiority over all who don’t agree with him, to tell the world “the rest of you are stupid for making a choice that I didn’t make.” It’s a cheap and easy thrill and a low-effort bit of self-congratulation. What’s lost on the hater, though, is that his categorical disdain for one product implies a categorical loyalty to another product. Loyalty is something companies love, because it counterbalances the need to perpetually innovate in order to retain consumers. Samsung executives must love Apple haters, because they know those folks are more likely to stick with Samsung even if its next innovation isn’t all that great.
They say haters gotta hate, but when we look below the surface, we often find that the haters are no different from those they hate.
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