Letters to Steve_ Inside the E-Mail Inbox of Apple's Steve Jobs - Mark Milian [13]
An unnamed Frenchman, who signed off his irate e-mail with the line, “Sorry for my bad language (I am french),” demanded to know why Apple had discontinued its server rack product called Xserve. Steve justified the move by saying, “Hardly anyone was buying them.” When another concerned information-technology worker asked whether the end of Xserve signaled the death of Mac OS X Server. Steve shot back, “No.”
One topic that came up repeatedly in e-mails dealt with the fate of Apple’s professional video-editing software. The company has offered two versions: iMovie, which is part of the iLife suite that’s packaged with every Mac sold, and Final Cut, which is for pros. As one might expect, the people who rely on Final Cut for their jobs are more zealous toward their program. One such video editor named Alex pleaded to Steve via e-mail for assurance that Apple was still committed to Final Cut, and he said he was concerned upon learning about defections from Apple’s development team in that division. “We certainly do. Folks who left were in support, not engineering. Next release will be awesome,” Steve wrote. Steve placated another person, saying, “No worries. FCP is alive and well.” And another: “A great release of Final Cut is coming early next year.” And another: “Stay tuned and buckle up.”
The version that eventually came, called Final Cut Pro X, was a completely rewritten app that looked and operated in a drastically different way. Customers immediately rejected it, and panned it as the consumerization and therefore, bastardization of pro software. The video team working on comedian Conan O’Brien’s TBS show developed a skit poking fun at the new version. Like the MobileMe fumble, Final Cut Pro X was a rare but public embarrassment for Apple.
Sometimes Apple products can suffer from being overhyped. Often, the hype was warranted, as evidenced by high sales and happy customers. Apple itself has an aggressive hype machine, and Steve Jobs was its wizard operator. The contents of each one of the seemingly inconsequential e-mails described in this chapter made headlines on countless technology news websites. Fans and reporters pored over each one-word or few-line message for clues to Apple’s future directions. Steve managed to control the narrative in many cases through e-mails, and through the innovative and accelerated game of telephone that shuffled a message from Steve through a customer and to thousands of people obsessively checking the blogs as often as they refresh their own inboxes.
Chapter 4
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Like an unfit father, Apple was taken from Steve Jobs once. “How can you get fired from a company you started?” Steve asked rhetorically in a commencement speech to Stanford University’s 2005 graduating class. Steve had adopted the paternal analogy, once telling Wired’s Steven Levy about tough managerial decisions made after his return to the company: “I was Dad. And that was hard.” Steve Jobs became especially protective of Apple, as he was for his own children. If Steve willfully hurt anyone, often it would be in self-defense.
“I love Apple so much,” he wrote in his bleak notice of medical leave in 2010, his last before resigning. When defending the company, Steve sometimes broke from his typical brevity in order to expound on why Apple made the choices that it did or on what Apple believes in.
In one such instance, tech blogger Robin Miller wrote to Steve shortly after the iPod’s debut in 2001. The subject line was, “Why does the iPod exist?” and Robin went on to criticize its high price tag and its inability to interface with Windows computers. Robin compared the iPod to the G4 Cube, an attractive, monitor-less