Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

information control

Apple is notoriously secretive about products it has in development, to the point where, in the most notorious recent case, it sued the college student behind Mac rumors site Think Secret for disclosing “trade secrets.” I can understand the desire for secrecy to some degree: wanting to stay a few step ahead of competitors, building buzz and anticipation about each new product announcement, etc. But it’s getting a bit irritating that this secrecy is extending even to the product announcements themselves.

A few years ago, Apple used to offer webcasts of Steve Jobs’s big keynote lectures in which he would unveil new Apple products. Utter geeks that we were, my team at GW would make a point of watching those webcasts, sometimes gathered around one computer screen as if watching an important press conference on CNN. It was fun, and I felt like we were actually a part of the event, sharing the experience with hundreds or thousands of other Mac enthusiasts around the world.

Apple doesn’t offer the webcasts anymore. But up until today, there were at least text-based updates from the events at various Mac sites, as people in the audience liveblogged the latest news via wifi or Blackberry or SMS. That’s no longer available either, apparently, as the Mac sites I frequent apparently have been unable to transmit from the site of today’s event (although MacRumors.com figured out some kind of workaround).

That level of control — preventing information from getting out even at the product annoucement event — just seems silly. You’d think that once you’ve publicly said to a group of media folks and Mac enthusiasts that your company is coming out with a new product, that information is public, and therefore no longer totally under your control. Isn’t it better to take that into account and actually aid that process of public dissemination of your annoucement, getting information out simultaneously online as it’s announced at the event, rather than embargo everything and tightly control the release of information? I’d think that strict control only encourages people to try to circumvent it, anyway.