Here's a fair and balanced — and useful — news item by Jack M. Germain at MacNewsWorld about MacBook laptops really heating up and doing some other odd things. It says, among other things: Some MacBook users have commented on MacBook support forums that Apple seemed to expect from the start that excessive heating issues would be rampant. The user manual alerts owners that the MacBook may get uncomfortably warm if left in the user's lap too long.
Unfortunately, though Mr. Germain notes he tried, PR people at Apple would not put anyone on the record about any of this.
Lynn Fox, Apple's Mac public relations director, and Katie Cotton, Apple's vice president of worldwide corporate communications, did not answer formal requests for interviews with Apple executives to discuss the lingering MacBook issues.
Isn't that a rather establishment response? Is it inappropriate? Is there ever a good reason not to talk about something like this?
Sure. But you're probably not going to like any of these answers:
1. Companies don't have to talk about anything they don't want to talk about unless required by law.
2. Companies are better off saying nothing when they don't know enough about a situation to be clear and accurate.
3. It is better to wait to know the whole or real story rather than offer inaccurate substitutions, or worse, for the facts.
4. In this case, they may be on the verge of preparing a response anyway? And as the article notes, corporation's do face legal liability for admissions about bad things they may have, or should have, known about but did not react to.
Trouble is, it never looks good. In the perception is reality business, passing on a chance to talk about something presumably negative makes corporate people appear to be dodging, hiding, averting, and covering up. That isn't necessarily the case, but it looks that way to many. So what does a company do in this situation?
Me? I talk about it because it's been my experience it is better to have an oar in the water on stories like this than to sit it out on the sidelines. If I can't right then talk about it because Steve Jobs will have me shot in the parking lot, then I try to find out when it can be talked about or I try my control freak approach and have the questions submitted for email response to avoid some free-wheeling anything goes interview. Or maybe I see if we can't do something off the record at least for background for the writer. Or I tell the truth and say the company hasn't got it's dance shoes on just yet over this matter and if I throw people at you who don't know what they're talking about, we're all going to look bad.
What would you do?
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