Product Planning and Apple Stores

I just had an evil thought. In every Apple store there's several computers setup where you can get on the Internet, play around, basically do everything you want. What if Apple were logging everything you do and studying that for marketing information? After all, they would be able to predict what Web 2.0 sites were getting popular before anyone else. But, even if you don't log what's going on, just watching over the shoulders of people tells you a lot about what people do on their computers. I just took a quick tour of the store here and saw Friendster, 123 Greetings, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, some sort of Oracle email app, Google maps, and Yahoo messenger being used. UPDATE: On second tour I saw two different people using Robert Scoble is the founder of the PodTech.net's Vice President of Media Development.

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