Letters to Steve_ Inside the E-Mail Inbox of Apple's Steve Jobs - Mark Milian [17]
In October 2008, one customer lamented how some MacBook laptops were no longer including a Firewire port. Steve, who seemed to be less adamant about the Firewire protocol that Apple had long pushed in its products, replied, “Actually, all of the new HD camcorders of the past few years use USB 2.” Before this, Apple had required PC users to install a rarely-used Firewire card in their computer in order to use the iPod. After this, Steve told another customer that Apple would not support next-generation USB.
In another instance, Steve tried to explain to an iPhone developer that a new Apple policy requiring apps to sell subscriptions through Apple’s billing system was created for publishers, not services. After much fury from media companies, even the publisher stipulation didn’t stick. Apple eventually backtracked on even that stance in a public mea culpa. Steve’s words were often taken as gospel, but keeping them in order was a task of biblical proportions.
Chapter 5
Redirect
Evaluating the effectiveness of the guerrilla marketing that Steve Jobs funneled through e-mail isn’t quite feasible. His messages succeeded at grabbing headlines, but whether the efforts materially helped the business can’t be sufficiently examined. Steve maintained a complicated relationship with the news media, and the e-mail communiqués provided a viable alternative.
In more traditional interviews, Steve readily misled reporters and analysts. The professional truth seekers tend to ask critical questions whose answers could reveal the secrets behind competitive moves or personal subjects. Steve tried to connect with the influential ones. He kindled a friendship with the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg. Steve called the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart when he thought a joke was funny or offensive, and he e-mailed the political satirist Stephen Colbert after he unsheathed an iPad from his jacket pocket at the Grammy Awards — making him one of the first to publicly show one after Steve. The subject line of that e-mail read “Last Night,” and the body said only, “Sweet! Thanks!”
When Steve, who rarely liked to use the term “no comment,” didn’t have someone under his thumb or could not ignore them, he fell back on misdirection. He threw verbal smoke bombs and pulled off conversational disappearing acts. In one of many instances where Steve’s actions contradicted his words, he said people do not want video on a small screen and later released a product called the iPod Video that offered just that. “It’s a stunner,” Steve said at its unveiling. He said people don't read anymore, and then opened a digital bookstore. In October 2008, he answered an analyst's question about netbooks by saying, “We don't know how to build a sub-$500 computer that is not a piece of junk.” Fifteen months later, he unveiled the iPad, a $499 portable computer that was conceived in the early 2000s. Steve also said in 2003 that Apple had no plans to make a tablet.
That the renowned Steve Jobs was a business, design, marketing and technology visionary has been established. So these seemingly shortsighted comments are interpreted as competitive misdirection, not as temporary blindness. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, Steve’s longtime rival, has been rankled over decades for a quote that has been attributed to him saying that 640 kilobytes of memory is all anyone would ever need in their computers. Of course, now they have four-thousand times that. But Bill seemingly never actually said this everlasting quote, except to debunk it. He told a class of students in the 1990s, “I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough