Earlier this week, tech blogs and rumour mills all over the internet exploded. Why? Because this appeared again:
This time it appears there was something gone amiss, and the store wasn’t down for long. However, for the most part, its all a hype building exercise. I can’t for the life of me imagine why there would be any technical reason Apple would need to take their store off-line every time they added a new product. Yes, there are some stuctural differences to the front page, but that alone hardly warrents removing the ability to buy from the company online for a number of hours. But yet every time the image above appears, the news sites and blogs take off with reports of possible new products or upgrades, even if none have been announced in the last few months. Every time.
Nor can I imagine any other companies customers being so forgiving or even so positively excitable over the store falling over, whatever the reason behind it. I guess the reality distortion field extends far beyond the immediate area Steve Jobs is standing in.
Apple knows exactly what they are doing. For what they lose in potential online sales (remember, physical Apple stores and the telephone store remains open the whole time so nothing is really lost), they gain an awful lot in free media from the people talking directly to those they want to sell to.
[tags]Apple, store, down, marketing[/tags]