Letters to Steve_ Inside the E-Mail Inbox of Apple's Steve Jobs - Mark Milian [8]
Steve was asked several times to address the issue of whether or not he was a real person who checked his e-mail and wrote back. When Steve discussed the prospect for an Apple PDA at a conference in 2003, several years after he had shuttered the Newton division, he said it was among the most common requests from customers. He also provided a small window into his mailbox. “My e-mail address is out there, so I get an e-mail every time somebody, you know, goes to the bathroom in Iowa,” he quipped. Steve responded to a lot of e-mails, and so from firsthand experience, he determined that stylus-based input, like those commonly found on PDAs and Windows Mobile devices, was inefficient. “If you do email of any volume, you’ve got to have a keyboard,” he said.
The same topic, about him responding to e-mails, came up again seven years later at the same conference venue, called All Things Digital. When a reporter pointed out that his e-mails often got published, whether or not Steve viewed it as surprising or as a betrayal of trust. “I know,” he said without further explanation. When asked what motivated his famous e-mail phenomenon, he offered only, “I’ve actually always done a bit of that.”
Chapter 3
New Message
For a reporter, there are few greater triumphs than breaking a story. To be the first person to bring something new to the world is a landmark. Steve Jobs’ shared similar convictions, and in some instances, that made reporters his enemies. It was evident, through his arrogance and his willful attempts at manipulation, that Steve did not appreciate or generally respect the news media. Rather, he saw them as valuable but only when used as a tool to accomplish his goals.
The media may love getting their scoops, but Steve savored his ladlefuls. Many tried, and some succeeded at, revealing what Apple was doing before Steve was ready to. From then on, Steve and his enforcers made sure that the enemies of secrecy were not in comfortable positions when dealing with Apple. As the company continued to gain power, that stance became more prevalent and more concerning to those tasked with covering its business.
Though not a news organization, Flurry, an analytics research firm, became a target of Apple’s vengeance. The company tried to make a name for itself by cunningly injecting its software into other apps and then recording the fingerprints of devices that access them in order to uncover when Apple was testing a new iOS product. After reporting its findings to various blogs, Steve Jobs and co. had a fit and quickly retaliated. Malcolm Barclay, an independent app developer and consultant, wrote Steve an e-mail on June 18, 2010 lamenting recent changes to the developer agreement that had effectively eliminated tools like Flurry. “Is this draconian measure simply in place just so we don’t see what Apple is working on next?” Malcolm asked.
Later that day, with a sleight of hand, Steve replied: “All the data Flurry is collecting is not anonymous, and the user is never asked their permission to give any data. Two cardinal privacy rules violated.” He expanded on this at a conference soon after, saying, “One day we read in the paper that a company called Flurry Analytics has detected that we have some new iPhone and other tablet devices that we’re using on our campus. We thought: what the hell? The way that they did this is they’re getting developers to