So an aspiring artist offered an application on apple’s iTunes store "I Am Rich" for the not-inconsequential price of $999.99. The listing clearly stated that the application did nothing (beyond provide bragging rights de jour).

A few people purchased the application and are now crying foul of the fact that someone sold an app for $999 which did nothing.

Apple, bending to the complaints and in a fit of political correctness indicative of why we live in sad times, blacklisted the application.

I mean WTF? There was no duplicity here – the app did exactly what it said it would. It’s like car dealers blacklisting Hummers because it’s discovered that they’re behemoths with terrible fuel economy that do nothing for the penis-envy suffered by most of the sad people who buy them.

Or like vendors black listing Vertu cellphones because they do no more than a cheap Nokia but cost many times more.

Where will this hyper-correct bizarreness end?

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

3 Comments
  • Nothing to do with political correctness, just basic common sense. Why would Apple want a high priced offering that openly admitted doing nothing in their itunes store? Political correctness would be arguing that Apple had no right to remove the app from the store.

  • Interesting perspective but most of the commentary I’ve seen has ben couched in terms of “this needs to be removed to stop people making the mistake and buying the product” which is political correctness in my book

  • Common Sense |

    Why would you want your business to be associated with or facilitating people making mistakes of this nature? It’s not like a couple of uninformed customers being offset by a huge number of satisfied customers. It is only natural for Apple to want to remove it. Sure the people who purchased the app have nobody to blame but themselves but that doesn’t mean Apple shouldn’t act on their feedback.

    As for the cellphone vendor example I applaud them blacklisting overpriced products, this is in the best interests of their customers.

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