steventoomey.com — Fader's Foibles

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Wharton is without question a great business school, and great business schools are generally full of great minds. So I was more than a little disappointed to read Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader’s comments about Apple’s iPhone in a recent Knowledge@Wharton interview.

My biggest problem with Fader’s critique is that it’s painfully obvious the guy did zero research before the interview. He definitely didn’t watch Steve Jobs’s Macworld keynote, or else he wouldn’t have claimed the lack of Mac-related announcements was “a signal that they’re not going to be developing or supporting [the Mac] as much as they used to.” Or that the corporate name change to Apple Inc. was an “admission of defeat.” Or that the iPhone’s lack of a keyboard is a “really, really important” missing feature. Um, not having a plastic keyboard is the whole point of the device! Fader could have saved himself and Wharton a lot of embarrassment if he’d done his homework rather than shooting from the hip. I doubt he’d expect anything less from his students in the classroom.