Letters to Steve_ Inside the E-Mail Inbox of Apple's Steve Jobs - Mark Milian [24]
Steve also believed, as any successful capitalist should, in the will of the free market and that if companies are acting dumb or unfairly, consumers will punish them for it. “If the market tells us we’re making the wrong choices, we listen to the market,” Steve elaborated at the All Things Digital conference in 2010. The onus is on Apple to take risks with products and to shape them in a way that is best, he said. “They’re paying us to make those choices. That’s what a lot of customers pay us to do, is to try to make the best products we can. And if we succeed, they’ll buy them, and if we don’t, they won’t. And it’ll all work itself out. So far, I’d have to say that people seem to be liking iPads. You know?”
At that conference, Steve was asked in an onstage interview about the interaction with Gawker’s Ryan Tate. Steve explained, with a tinge of animus in his voice: “He never identified himself as a journalist. But I was working late one night. It was actually, like, two in the morning, I think. And I was working on — I’m making a presentation next Monday — and I was working on that presentation, and this guy starts e-mailing me these obnoxious emails, and I, you know, I’m just enough of a sucker that I want to, like, straighten this guy’s thinking out. So I start to respond to him, and he responds back. He’s not, you know, he’s no dummy, and he’s responding back, and we got in this conversation. It was kind of entertaining. And then he publishes it. So you know, that’s OK.”
Steve wasn’t alone in his suggestion that Ryan Tate had stepped over the line when he failed to clearly disclose in the conversation that he’s a reporter and then published the e-mails. Anthony de Rosa of Reuters asks, “Why does everyone who e-mails with Steve Jobs think they have the right to republish their conversations?” Craig Kanalley, an editor at the Huffington Post, reasons: “Ryan never explicitly identifies himself as from Gawker, though yes, he drops enough hints as the thread goes on. It turned out to be an exclusive Q&A with the Apple CEO. One Jobs didn’t necessarily sign off on (and would never after all of this). Ethically, the whole thing just seems flaky.”
Gawker, ever the thorn in Steve Jobs’ side, drummed up a short-lived controversy around another conversation with Steve. Though, in this one, the e-mailer did describe herself as a journalist or at least, an aspiring one. The blog published Steve’s e-mail chat with Chelsea Kate Isaacs, who, as a journalism student at Long Island University in September 2010, was assigned to write an article about her school giving iPads to freshmen and transfer students. Chelsea was furious that Apple’s public relations department had ignored her six phone calls, and she expressed those frustrations in a lengthy message to Steve. (Technology reporters for any publication below the top tier would sympathize with Chelsea.)
Steve did respond, but it was not the type of comment Chelsea was looking for. “Our goals do not include helping you get a good grade. Sorry,” Steve wrote. In Chelsea’s follow-up, she hopped the line between polite and passive aggressive, suggesting that it should be Apple’s job to respond to all inquiries. Steve was not swayed: “Nope. We have over 300 million users and we can't respond to their requests unless they involve a problem of some kind. Sorry.” Chelsea pushed further, saying she is a customer and does have a problem that requires an answer from Apple’s media relations department. Steve had apparently lost any modicum of patience he may have had before. “Please leave us alone,” he wrote.
Steve Jobs didn’t have much of a soft spot for education, despite starting a failed venture called NeXT designed to build computers for educational institutions, giving a commencement speech for Stanford and marrying a graduate of that school who held