Letters to Steve_ Inside the E-Mail Inbox of Apple's Steve Jobs - Mark Milian [18]
People aspiring to do business with Apple were not immune to its co-founder’s hypnotic charm. With their blinders on, Steve was able to derail them, and still provide a great story for them to tell to friends. Panic Inc., a successful independent software maker, chronicles on its website a story told by its co-founder, Cabel Sasser, about how he was tricked and then bested by Steve. It started, as most stories in this book do, with an e-mail. “I couldn't help myself. I'd always heard that Steve Jobs, founder and CEO of Apple, actually reads his e-mail,” Cabel recounts. “It's pretty hard to resist e-mailing God if you know He checks his e-mail.” Cabel sent Steve a short pitch for Audion in August 1999, a few days after version 1.0 of his music app was released, but did not receive a response. No surprise, says Cabel.
Then, a couple of weeks after that first e-mail to Steve, Cabel received a cryptic message from Charles Wiltgen, then the QuickTime video technology manager for Apple developer relations. “I’d like to talk Audion future directions,” Charles wrote. This is a request many small technology startups field from Apple. Swype, the innovative touchscreen keyboard software developer, says it had one such meeting, too, before Nuance Communications Inc. acquired it. Between the long lead time associated with such a “future directions” meeting, Cabel’s Panic software studio engaged with AOL Time Warner Inc. about an acquisition. (This was before the conglomerate experienced a myriad of its own problems.) Cabel was excited about the prospect of offering Audion for free in order to get the program in the hands of more people. However, he was not keen on working for a lurching corporate giant. At the height of those negotiations in the summer of 2000, Apple showed up again. Panic tried to include AOL in the meeting with Apple, but the AOL execs said they were busy, and then Apple balked. No meeting took place.
Later that year, rumors began to swirl that Apple was getting serious about developing music software. Cabel Sasser sent an e-mail to Phil Schiller, Apple’s head of marketing, who declined to address the speculation. Cabel mentioned in those exchanges that Panic’s talks with AOL had ended. In a last-ditch effort, Cabel sent a message to Steve Jobs. Steve responded this time — on Christmas Eve, and bearing what looked like a present. “I hear that your deal with AOL fell through. Any interest in throwing in with us at Apple?” Steve wrote, as Cabel recalls, with much enthusiasm, the high of having received a message from “the guy who we basically owe our entire professional existence to, who basically created the very platform we want to hug, the computers we want to crush into little pure plump pieces of joy.”
Panic and Apple set a time for a meeting a few weeks after that, which happened to take place only days after the annual Macworld Conference & Expo, where Apple traditionally announced new products back then. And Apple did indeed announce new initiatives. Cabel and his colleagues sat in San Francisco’s Moscone keynote auditorium on January 9, 2001 watching Steve Jobs saunter around the stage and show, for the first time, the simple and, more important, free iTunes. This sent the Panic guys into, well, a panic. They wondered whether Apple had instantly vaporized their market.
Cabel met Steve for the first time in the expo hallway after the keynote. They had a brief conversation, and Steve asked Cabel what he thought of iTunes. Cabel said it was very well designed but that Audion would still have a market because iTunes lacked advanced features. “Yeah? Like what?” Steve snapped. Cabel explained that Audion had the ability to keep track of play counts and rate songs. “Why the hell would anybody want to do that?” Steve asked incredulously. (Apple added those features in later versions of iTunes.)