What happens when you order a great deal from a major electronics company and the item becomes backordered? 99% of the time, the company will email you and tell you the item is no longer available and that you’re SOL. So, you can imagine my initial reaction when I received an email from Best Buy concerning a $99 HD-DVD player I had ordered. The subject read…

BBFB Discontinued Product – item# BB10818493

Seeing as it was a great deal–it normally retails for $300–I expected the email to tell me that the player was out of stock and that my order had been canceled. C’est la vie, right?

But, no. Best Buy did the unimaginable. It apologized for the item no longer being available and so would instead ship me the next model up.

If you’re one of the many companies that doesn’t feel it needs to monitor its online reputation–or perhaps feels its brand is bullet-proof–take a look at what has happened to Apple recently.

Up until a few weeks ago, Apple had a rock-solid reputation–one that any company would desperately love to have.

Then, Apple made a few mistakes:

1. It lowered the price of its new iPhone by $200–leaving more than a million owners feeling a little “annoyed”.
2. It updated the firmware of the iPhone–leaving many unlocked iPhones as useless bricks.
3. It wiped out third-party iPhone applications from phones.

In just a few short weeks, the shine has come off of Apple and it’s not just because of the iPhone. BusinessWeek reports that as the company sells more computers, more customers are realizing that Apple’s customer support sucks.