You have to hand it to Apple. The company has perfected the technique of turning even the most mundane of details into front page news. <\/p>\n
Take, for example, the iPhone 3.0 update that was splashed all over the news media yesterday. The update, which will allow users to copy and paste text and handle multimedia (MMS) messages, was top news on many mainstream news sites, likewise on most blogs and even the Twitter-sphere was agog at the news.<\/p>\n
That users of the glitzy iPhone will now have the ability to perform basic functions that users of just about every other mobile phone have been able to do forever, is sure to please fans but the real story is that the iPhone couldn’t do these in the first place. A cutting edge, touchscreen smartphone built on Mac OS X that can’t copy and paste or MMS is almost unthinkable. Even phones with many years of use can certainly handle MMSes and any smartphone worth its salt can do cut and paste.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t a secret that the iPhone couldn’t perform these functions. It’s just that in the hype around the first and second generation of the phone, very few bothered to mention it. And now that the update to fix these things has arrived, Apple has once again displayed its brand strength and its remarkable ability to "spin" a story by turning what was essentially a failing in its product into fresh new headlines. <\/p>\n
There are more than a handful of other companies that could well benefit from the same ability to turn failure into fortune. <\/p>\n