Oh the irony. Apple's emerging PR threat comes from a command-obeying robot. (See Apple's famed 1984 ad.)

When you’re number one, everyone is a hater. As Chris Dixon recently tweeted, “Let me get this straight: some guy speculates he could hack the iPad hence major business mag reports it’s insecure??” Indeed, when you’re el numero uno (officially as of 5/27), the media and your competitors are on the hunt for the slightest whiff of anything negative to slam you with, even if it’s it untrue or doesn’t make any sense.

The memes of Apple as “closed” “restrictive” and “arbitrary” are potentially the most damaging to the brand. These gibes have been around for a while but it is Android has truly brought them to the public’s attention. I cite two arguments for these being the most damaging: 1) Apple’s historical brand equity is built upon the concepts of “creative” “freedom” and “individual”—the very antithesis of “restrictive.” (See Apple’s famed Super Bowl ad, “1984”.) 2) Apple’s modern resurgence is based upon Apple’s brand defeating the reality and perception of Apple as “incompatible.” Consumers only bought Apple products en masse once they believed and experienced true cross-platform compatibility, embodied in the iPod, iTunes and Intel Macs (see Kellogg Prof. Julie Hennessy’s case on Apple and the iPod).

So given this particular reality, what is Apple to do? How can Apple defeat the memes of “closed” “restrictive” and “arbitrary”?

1) The New “Open” App Store Takes a Lesson from Amazon

Much of Apple’s brand’s greatest ire stems from Apple’s 100% control over the App Store. However, as Steve Jobs has directly argued, control is necessary to keep the App Store within brand and grant “freedom from programs that steal your private data” “freedom from programs that trash your battery” and “freedom from porn”. So how can Apple reconcile this tension? I believe the solution is by offering a first-party App Store as it is today (analogous to products “sold by Amazon.com”), but also offering a gate out of Disney World to third-party affiliate merchants (think Amazon Merchants) whose veracity can be approved by Cupertino and also continuously rated by customers (think Amazon Merchant star ratings). These Merchants would of course be limited in number and scope, but ultimately the effect would be that the App Store is no longer perceived to be directly under SJ’s thumb. This could be structured in such a way to create distance between Apple’s brand and the Merchant’s experience and goods. It’s all in the execution.

In conjunction, the other half of the equation would be that Apple would need to develop more clear guidelines for the app approval process (as John Gruber has previously argued).

2) Requiring Flash to Reach Goals, not Saintdom

Steve, I fully concur with you on every point you raise in your “Thoughts on Flash,” but the issue from a PR perspective is that it comes off as a crusade against all things Adobe since you pose problems that seem to have no solutions. Instead of indentifying the issues in such a way that they appear intractable, you should have simply set out specific and explicit hurdles that Flash must clear before being allowed on iPhone OS (even if you don’t believe some of them could ever be accomplished). For instance, “Cannot drain battery more than Quicktime and H.264. Must be fully touch compliant as approved by Apple’s HI team—we can help you on this. Must be open source.” I believe this would have been much better received. And yes, I did throw that last one in there—my point is that by publicly issuing a challenge for Adobe to open source you could have won major PR points rather than reinforcing the perception of Apple as closed by “shutting Adobe out” which I believe “Thoughts on Flash” is widely perceived to have done.

3) From MobileMe to OpenMe

If you really want to deflate the (Android) zombies out there who think Apple is “closed” and “restrictive,” open and free MobileMe. As my buddy Sachin has argued, start off by making MobileMe $0. Next, give people a whole bunch of free cloud space (5GB? 10GB? 20GB? 100GB?) and see what they do with it. Let them be creative. Allow music and media streaming. Cache iTunes purchases in the cloud. Open up an API. Go wild. Surprise us all and blow our minds. You know, think different.