How does Apple get away with it?
After five years of selling DRM-crippled music, Apple is trying to get out of that business — except Steve Jobs and Associates want their customers to pay for the company’s strategic mistake. Even worse: it used to be that you could repair your broken files one at a time for 30 cents each. Now, as that imposing, solitary “BUY” button makes clear, regular customers of the iTunes Music Store can make up for five years of Apple’s music-selling mistake only in one expensive swoop. Wouldn’t Apple gain more goodwill (and, in the long term, more money) if it simply liberated files that its loyal customers had paid for already?
I know many Apple products have astonishingly good hardware and software design. But does that make up for the company treating its customers this way?
