TheOverAnalyzed

Serenity Caldwell for iMore, in the wake of AOL shuttering TUAW, and on the notion that small blogs are done:

They just can’t seem to wrap their heads around this concept — that different products are going to have different markets, and there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to selling them.

She made reference to the Apple Retail Store initiative in 2001. In those days, Apple Retail stores operated at a loss, and everyone thought it was stupid to continue to do so for three years. But Apple didn’t take the traditional Wall Street approach. Apple knew that its retail presence would help sell not only devices, but culture.^[1] Culture is the best marketing inroad a company can have. So who cares if the Stores sucked for a few years? Well, Wall Street cares. And like almost everything Wall Street thinks about Apple (2.0), they are wrong.

Caldwell on The Genius Bar:

Apple’s Genius Bar is probably the better example of the company investing money in services it never expected to be directly profitable. The Genius Bar has been free to visit since its inception in 2001, and it has undoubtedly helped millions of people understand and fix their devices. Free customer support — even if that doesn’t always result in a free repair — is a huge draw, and a large part of Apple’s community-building. You get to buy an Apple product knowing that you have the peace of mind to come in and ask about a problem if you’re confused or if your device breaks. The Genius Bar may not sell anything directly to the consumer, but it gets people to purchase Apple products all the same.

I’m as ardent Genius Bar hater as anyone, mostly because I am egotistical when it comes to tech knowledge. Also because I have had high expectations that the Bar would be able to actually help me fix my nerd issue. I have visited the Bar maybe 5 times in my Apple hardware life, and every time, I have been disappointed. I suppose I always go there *hoping* that my knowledge will be surpassed, and that they might actually be able to help me. Alas, no. But Caldwell’s point here is well-taken. What Fortune 500 company provides customer service at this level? What company can I call on the phone, and, after muttering an explicative, be transferred immediately to a real human? Right.

She also jumps on the bandwagon of legitimately defending iPad’s “dismal” sales this past quarter:

The iPad may never look like the iPhone, but that doesn’t mean it’s a failure. Heck, the Mac’s never going to look like the iPhone, but you don’t see Apple abandoning their desktop and laptop base and consolidating that R&D into iOS. Just because the product serves a smaller market doesn’t mean it’s any less important or vital to the company’s business.

Exactly.

Finally, she touches on the TUAW closure one last time:

Whether you’re a big business that owns a small property or a single writer operating a piece of Internet space, you can’t expect to woo a smaller audience with blanket big blog tactics. To build a good niche blog, you need to know your audience and work for them, not a void of unnamed blank-faced consumers.

I think we can all assume that AOL, being the antiquated behemoth communications company that it is, hoped that TUAW would have pushed page views as high as The Verge, or TechCrunch. And when TUAW didn’t “perform,” its demise was unavoidable. This is the same-old strategy that has plagued big business tech companies in the past. It can’t all be about numbers. If it was, there would have been no Apple 2.0. We might all still be thumb typing using T9.

Smaller blogs like TUAW can make a worthwhile contribution. They just can’t under the status-quo regime that is currently in place.

RIP TUAW.