Apple is not about creating a dialogue with customers to understand their needs. Apple is all about producing the products that Apple wants to produce. As I heard one executive say, “customers don’t know what to buy, we have to tell them what to buy.”

That in turn leads to a culture that obsesses over customer messaging. In some situations, each word that a customer might read or hear is strictly controlled. The preference is to say nothing if anything might be misinterpreted.

Of course that doesn’t mean that Apple products aren’t great. I love my Macs, but I think they could be better if the company were more open and listened to their customers a little more.

You might want to try my ApplePeels blog for an in depth look at Apple. It’s therapy for me as an ex-Apple person transitioning from within the reality distortion field to the normal world, where few know or care what a MacWorld is. I get feedback from a number of Apple employees that things have not changed since I left.

The good news for me is Linux is making tremendous progress, so maybe I won’t always have to depend on a company which takes most of its users for granted.