Letters to Steve_ Inside the E-Mail Inbox of Apple's Steve Jobs - Mark Milian [10]
To: brian lam Brian, Parts of it I like, and other parts I don't understand. I'm not sure the "information density" is high enough for you and your brand. Seems a bit too tame to me. I'll look for it this weekend and be able to give you some more useful feedback after that. I like what you guys do most of the time, and am a daily reader. Steve Sent from my iPad Just a few weeks later, the exchanges became choleric. While Brian Lam was taking a leave from work, his colleague Jason Chen dropped a bomb on the tech industry. Gizmodo paid $5,000 for a prototype of the iPhone 4, which an Apple employee had left in a German beer garden in Redwood City, California. It was disguised by a plastic case that made the drastically redesigned iPhone look almost identical to its predecessor. An hour after Jason posted high-quality photographs, videos and an in-depth review of the gadget’s intricacies, his boss Brian received a phone call. “Hi, this is Steve. I really want my phone back.” Steve went on: “I appreciate you had your fun with our phone, and I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at the sales guy who lost it. But we need the phone back because we can’t let it fall into the wrong hands.” Brian had a series of off-the-record phone conversations with the powerful and irate luminary about the lost phone, and later had to juggle a lawsuit from Apple that involved Gizmodo and the young man who sold the phone. Brian offered to return the phone, but not before milking the treasure piece with more stories and demanding an official letter from Apple claiming the device. Steve declined, and then a police task force went to seize Jason Chen’s computer and files. But before hanging up on that first of many phone calls with Brian about the matter, Steve, the proud father of computer innovation who was only feeling burned because he wasn’t the one to introduce his prized cub to the world, asked, “What do you think of it?” Even without the help of Steve’s big unveiling and famed “reality-distortion field,” Brian admitted, “It’s beautiful.” Pontificating on the matter a few months later at that year’s All Things Digital conference, Steve said: “When this whole thing with Gizmodo happened, I got a lot of advice from people that said, ‘You’ve got to just let it slide. You can’t, you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t go after a journalist because they bought stolen property, and they tried to extort you. You should let it slide. Apple is a big company now. You don’t want the PR. You should let it slide.’ And I thought deeply about this, and I ended up concluding that the worst thing that could possibly happen as we get big, and we get a little more influence in the world is if we change our core values and start letting it slide. I can’t do that. I’d rather quit. You know, you go back five years ago, and what would we have done if something like this happened? What would we have done 10 years ago? We have the same values now, as we’ve had then. We’re a little more experienced, certainly beat-up, but the core values are the same.” Apple would demonstrate again the next year, with Tim Cook as interim CEO in 2011, that its values remained unaltered, when the situation nearly repeated itself, and Apple sent two of its security officials along with four San Francisco police officers to search the home of a man suspected of finding an iPhone 4S prototype that was left in a bar in the city. After that and just a few weeks before Steve Jobs’ death, Brian Lam sent one final e-mail to make amends. Brian later learned from someone close to Steve that the situation was “water under the bridge.” From: brian lam Subject: Hey Steve Date: September 14, 2011 12:31:04 PM PDT To: Steve Jobs Steve, a few months have passed since all that iphone 4 stuff went down, and I just wanted to say that I wish things happened differently. I probably should have quit right after the first story was published for several different reasons. I didn't know how to say