Apple Just Is Not Serious about China
Update October 21, 2006: Beihang University has performed some scheduled maintenance on their network and I am now able to access Apple’s US site without any hiccups. Of course, this doesn’t affect Apple’s site itself and the below mentioned links on Apple China’s support site remain broken. End update.
After confirming with other people in Beijing, it seems that Apple’s homepage is loading fine on other networks here and that the problem I have been having may just be affecting the network here at Beihang University.
In any case, Apple still doesn’t seem at all serious about the Chinese market. I don’t mean majorly serious either, I just mean the absolute basics. Not only am I having trouble accessing Apple’s homepage, but also I am having trouble downloading updates via Software Update. Now my current access problems may be mostly confined to the network I’m on at the moment, but I also had similar problems for a while when I was living in Weifang, which makes me think that this problem might affect a few other Mac users in China from time to time. So, I decided to take a trip to Apple China’s support site to see if I could find any information and perhaps download the updates I need without having to use a slow proxy to get them from the US site.
That was when I discovered an unbelievably huge booboo that Apple is making. The Apple China Support page has the following links running across the top of their Support site (these are a bit different than the US site): Products, Knowledge Base, Downloads, Discussions, Specs and Manuals. The booboo is that the Knowledge Base and Downloads links are broken. Could you imagine Apple having broken links across the top of their US Support site? No? Neither can I. This is not an access problem either, as Apple returns a 403 error saying “Forbidden You don’t have permission to access / on this server.” It’s not just my IP being blocked, because I can’t access it via proxy either. You only need to click on the links to confirm this.
Apple, seriously, what is wrong with your China operation? I’ll tell you what. My current teaching contract ends in July 2007. I’ll put in a job app with you guys here in China next spring and offer to try to solve some of your problems here in China, like improving the quality control of your website and improving the standard of service at your authorized retail outlets here. I suspect the root of these problems is miscommunication between Apple US and Apple China. Having an American on the ground in China keeping tabs on these things may help to bring to light some of this miscommunication and solve some of these problems. You can read some more ideas about improving your China operation here and here.
October 19, 2006 at 1:27 pm
[...] CHINA – Apple Just Is Not Serious about China “Could you imagine Apple having broken links across the top of their US Support site? No? Neither can I.” [...]
October 20, 2006 at 2:29 pm
I just looked at a site where the page explaining their quality control procedures goes to an Error 404. I concur with you that one is entitled to read things into these mistakes.