Apple Briefs Russian Journalists on Month-Old Products, Forbids Recording

Apple is known for their impressive press events where they invite all the journalists and bloggers who could be interested to make presentations of new products and get all the coverage they can get in both online resources and traditional media. Sometimes these events are also broadcast live online, in other cases you will always find at least a dozen of bloggers who will be liveblogging the event anyway.

But the situation is totally different here in Russia: during the two years of existence of Russian branch (and availability of Apple retail stores in various Russian cities as well) Apple only invited journalists to press events twice with a whole year separating the two events. Today I’ve read a report from the last event published by one of the participants of the meeting (in Russian) and could not help but wonder how it happens that Apple, the company that is probably best known for its talent to generate buzz, is acting in such a clumsy manner in one particular country.

The first press event for Russian journalists was held when the company announced Macbook Air where everything the representatives of the company were willing to do was repeat the famous keynote by Steve Jobs with minor alterations (even thought everyone had watched it online by that time already anyway).

The second event happened earlier this week and involved a meeting with Apple EMEA Erik Stannow and was focused on iWork ‘09 and iLife ‘09. Here is where the first question is: what’s the point in holding a dedicated press event (if only with journalists from 4 media outlets invited only) for the products that were launched in early January? After all, journalists tend to be able to read press releases and find product descriptions online so it is no wonder there were comments that the event was not bad because they served good coffee.

The overall discussion was a pretty funny one with Apple VP kindly giving advice on how users should deal with disadvantages of the software offered by the company - like never forgetting to save their documents without the automatic saving functionality or constantly teaching the spell checker basic Russian words as its existing vocabulary is too small to avoid this. Of course there were tons of promises to look into the problems reporters complained about - if there were enough users sharing their concerns.

But the most amazing thing about this event was that for some reason Apple has forbidden reporters to do any recording at all - be it photo, audio, or video. As a result, there are no photos of the event available online and the Q&A part is only based on what journalists were able to write down while speaking.

So what exactly should be the reason for Apple to brief press on the software launched a month ago? What’s the point in inviting the journalists and never even letting them make a photo or record the conversation? To me it looks very much like demonstrating to this market that you as a company do not really respect the people here (both users and journalists) and are not even prepared to work with Russian users to make their lives better (by doing simple things like fixing the problems in the spell checker for those people who are generous enough to buy your software which is not really a popular thing to do here).

Of course Russia is no Silicon Valley and we only have a very limited number of Apple fans here. But there is a pretty simple explanation to this as well. One of the many things Apple products are famous for is their price that is often much higher than what an average consumer is prepared to pay for a new computer, for example. So you think a Macbook is an expensive computer that you can not afford? Think again as here in Russia in Apple stores the price is twice as high (and I really don’t think it is because of the customs fees, this all looks like a shaped pricing policy for Apple with iPhones sold for $1,000 here). I guess it must be clear why there are not so many Apple users here - especially with Apple not working as hard as it does elsewhere on building a cult or a religion of the company and its products in Russia.

«MacBook with Russian keyboard» on Yandex Fotki

But while Russia is so clearly neglected by Apple, it is a huge and rapidly growing market at the same time. I do not have statistics here but my own experience shows that Russian users replace their computers with new ones much more frequently than people in the US - even despite of the very high prices you will often meet a person who will buy a new expensive laptop every 1.5-2 years.

Yet to me it looks like Apple seems to make conclusions about the Russian market based on some strange idea they have of an average Russian person - always drunk and poorly educated - which has almost nothing to do with reality these days. Instead, the country where I live is really a huge market where people are accustomed to spending much more on computers than people in the US do (simply because of higher prices for electronics, sometimes twice higher) and while we have a bad habit of pirating software Apple computers and gadgets could have found lots of passionate users here - if only Apple agreed to notice us and act like the company actually respect people in this country. But right now the impression is totally negative and doing marketing like this will hardly win the market.