I have a very simple way of measuring the brand equity of a company – how many mistakes you allow a company to make before dumping it.

Apple did things right mostly till the time they decided to launch the iPhone bundled with AT&T. Microsoft had to face a lawsuit for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. It was criticized by almost anyone who walks on two feet but when Apple did the same things there were only a muted protest and that too by people who don’t like Apple. I hope you know that the Safari web browser is bundled in iPhone. Did I hear a voice of protest?

The other wrong thing was to launch the touch I pad and the iPhone with a memory of 8 GB and offering incremental memory increases which still are way below the 160GB – the highest capacity of a regular iPod launched by Apple.

Now comes the iPad. I still know a lot of people who are willing to forgive apple for all the drawbacks of iPad and still buy it.
How long before the apple user says “Apple, we need to talk…”