Hiding the truth is the Silicon Valley way

It’s an old adage in politics and public relations: It’s not the crime that will kill you, but the coverup. Just ask Barry Bonds, whose shot at the Hall of Fame has foundered on the rocks of perjury, or Richard Nixon. You’d think that would be true in the technology industry as well. But Apple and Amazon.com demonstrated this week that they don’t believe it is. Both companies stonewalled like crazy, elevating understandable mistakes and problems to the level of scandal by refusing to explain what happened and why in a timely fashion.

Maybe the reason they behaved that way is that all too often Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and other tech companies have gotten away with it. Indeed, refusing to acknowledge problems has become the reaction of first resort for Apple. This month, it was the issue of location data stored on an iPhone; last year the company pretended for weeks that there was no problem with the radio antenna on the iPhone 4. A year earlier, it said nothing about a bug that let iPhones lie about their security status and get access to networks they shouldn’t have, then quietly fixed the bug and “broke” a lot of iPhones in the process, all with no explanation.

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Wait a minute, you say: Apple got caught on the location issue, received a black eye, and came clean on Wednesday. That’s true, but it took a weeklong barrage of terrible, worldwide publicity and the threat of an investigation by the U.S. Senate to make that happen. Apple will tweak some security settings, but don’t think that when some other issue surfaces Apple won’t handle it any differently.

Have you looked at Apple’s stock price lately or noticed how strong sales of the iPhone remain, despite an obvious and very annoying design flaw? Steve Jobs and company are far from stupid. They’ve noticed that they’re rewarded — or at least not penalized — for bad behavior, so they have no reason to change.

Plenty of other tech companies behave that way, and now it looks like Amazon.com is on the same course.

Apple’s location contretemps was not a big deal, but Apple let it become one I wasn’t all atwitter (pun intended) about Apple’s penchant for storing a database of location data on the user’s own computer. Ultimately, it didn’t involve a dangerous invasion of privacy, and Apple had disclosed elements of the issue some time ago.

But I am appalled that the company took a week to give users a serious explanation of what it’s doing with that data and why it stores the information for as long as a year. Even if Apple didn’t know about the bugs it now claims are the cause of the yearlong location retention and its being backed up via iTunes, the company could have at least reiterated when the concerns surfaced that it doesn’t track user data, that its terms of use note that anonymized location data is sent to Apple for network mapping, and that it would investigate the concerns over the locally stored data. Apple did none of that. (Apple CEO Steve Jobs did tell the New York Times late yesterday that Apple doesn’t go public until it has researched the facts, in an interview unusual for its nearly apologetic tone.)

Furthermore, such issues are not just a matter for privacy-conscious consumers to worry about. If Apple is playing fast and loose with location data, IT managers have a right and a duty to be sure that iPhones and iPads don’t have other gaping security holes as they take their place in the enterprise.

Apple finally fessed up on Wednesday. But what was the company thinking in the meantime? Not only did it give itself a boatload of bad publicity (its problem, not ours), but it likely made life that much harder for business users and IT staffers, who are fighting their bureaucracies to win acceptance for mobile computing devices in the enterprise. Apple knows that battle is raging, so you’d think the company would want to reassure people the issue was simply not particularly significant.

That’s not the Apple way, as we’ve repeatedly seen. Not only did the company pretend that Antennagate wasn’t happening a year ago, it ignored a far more serious problem (from IT’s point of view) when it allowed iPhones and iPod Touches to falsely report to Exchange servers that they support on-device encryption. As my colleague Galen Gruman commented at the time, it was a fundamental betrayal of trust. So where’s the consequence?

Amazon.com’s silence on its cloud crash only reinforces cloud reliability fears Then there’s Amazon.com. The company’s popular EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud) and Relational Database Services went down last week, leaving heavily trafficked websites and services such as Reddit, Foursquare, and Hootsuite crippled or outright disabled for a good portion of the workday.

Unlike the Apple location misadventure, the Amazon outage had immediate business consequences for EC2 customers in the form of lost sales, lost data, and serious inconvenience. I have no doubt that a lot of IT managers, already somewhat nervous about entrusting key processes to servers outside their control, are being called on the carpet by CEOs made furious by business lost because of the outages. What’s worse, of course, is the reinforced perception that cloud computing is still dangerous and immature.

Given that, you’d think that Amazon.com would fall all over itself, giving specifics of why it happened and what steps it is taking to ensure that it won’t happen again. But it hasn’t. If I were running Amazon Web Services, I’d go further: Amazon.com should be initiating a discussion about levels of services and the need for disaster recovery. Let’s face it — outages are going to happen, and Amazon.com might as well admit it and help customers prepare.

Maybe I’m old-fashioned. But I taught my kids that if they messed up, their dad would stay cool if they admitted what they had done. I don’t think expecting the same quality of behavior from vendors is asking too much. But until customers and shareholders give them a spanking, why would anything change? In fact, it will only get worse — as most tech companies won’t tell you.

I welcome your comments, tips, and suggestions. Post them here so that all our readers can share them, or reach me at bill.snyder@sbcglobal.net. Follow me on Twitter at BSnyderSF.

This article, “Hiding the truth is the Silicon Valley way,” was originally published by InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bill Snyder’s Tech’s Bottom Line blog and follow the latest technology business developments at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.