Letters to Steve_ Inside the E-Mail Inbox of Apple's Steve Jobs - Mark Milian [11]
I'm sorry for the problems I caused you.
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Failures for Steve Jobs, at least in the third act upon his return to and revival of Apple, were rare, but they affected him immensely. With iTools, .Mac and MobileMe, Steve and several iterations of Web development teams tried unsuccessfully to conquer the Internet services game that was becoming fast dominated by Facebook Inc., Google Inc. and, during a certain period, Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc.
The MobileMe disaster, as chronicled in Adam Lashinsky’s Fortune article and book by the same name, Inside Apple, spurred Steve to dress down the team in the company’s Town Hall auditorium. “You’ve tarnished Apple's reputation,” he told them, according to Adam’s account. “You should hate each other for having let each other down,” he scolded. Referencing Walt Mossberg’s scathing review in the Wall Street Journal, Steve reportedly said, “Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing good things about us.” A crucial barometer of MobileMe’s problems came from Steve’s own inbox. An internal Apple presentation leaked to the blog Mac Rumors contained a slide that showed a graph titled “Executive Escalations, MobileMe Launch.” The bar graph dated January 23, 2009 shows spikes that eventually decreased over the course of several months. The chart’s data source is listed as “242 total customer complaints about MobileMe e-mailed to Steve Jobs.”
Apple coyly leaked details of a revamped Internet service called iCloud to the news media before an ailing Steve emerged at the company’s developers conference to unveil it. There, he acknowledged his failings with previous Web endeavors, saying sympathetically, “‘Why should I believe them? They’re the ones that brought me to MobileMe.’ It wasn’t our finest hour; let me just say that. But we learned a lot.” The admission echoed an e-mail Steve sent to Apple staff two years earlier in which he offered thoughts on how MobileMe should have been rolled out and on how Apple could pick up the pieces.
At the developers conference, Steve went on to indicate how iCloud could have kicked off a fourth act, that, in the scope of things, ended for Steve barely after the curtain opened but could rocket Apple into a new phase, in which habits shift from when “the PC was going to be the digital hub for your digital life,” which worked “for the better part of 10 years. But it’s broken down in the last few years. Why? Well, the devices have changed. They now all have music. They now all have photos. They now all have video.” He continued: “We’ve got a great solution for this problem. And we think this solution is our next big insight. We’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to just being a device — just like the iPhone, the iPad and the iPod Touch.”
Before this final product introduction from Steve and before the tidbits appeared in newspapers, he gave the first indication that it was in the works in an e-mail reply to a frustrated customer on June 10, 2011 who asked Steve if MobileMe would improve. “Yes, it will get a lot better in 2011,” Steve wrote. He released another tidbit a year later when asked by e-mail whether iWeb, the website builder, would be discontinued. “Yep,” Steve replied.
Something newsworthy would periodically land in someone’s inbox from the desk of Steve Jobs. On December 5, 2010, Steve confirmed a fear that IDG World Expo and fans weren’t quite ready to face: that after decades of Apple participating in and announcing new products at the Macworld Expo, the company had no plans to ever return. “Sorry, no,” Steve replied to a hopeful follower who noticed that Apple had been minimizing its involvement in the conference’s affairs and said it would not have a presence at the one being held the following month. Steve’s e-mails became a regularly trusted source for Apple news around this time. Incrementally, the thriving mill of rumor sites dedicated to the