The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote (2010)
In 2003, I met Steve Jobs to get CD Baby's catalog into iTunes, only to face a confusing delay after he publicly criticized independent services like mine during a keynote. Despite refunding $200,000 to 5,000 musicians because I couldn't guarantee delivery, Apple suddenly accepted our contract the next day. This experience taught me a hard lesson: never promise customers something entirely out of your control.
Ever since I started my company in 1998, I had been offering an excellent service. I could make promises and keep them, because I was in full control.
- snowwrestler
I remember when this happened. Apple’s corporate staff screwed up and didn’t have the contract done in time to have the music in by the keynote. And of course they are not going to move the keynote. So Jobs had to spin it: the small number of songs is a good thing, actually!
He was one of the best at this. PowerPC is not keeping up with Intel? Spin it! (Then switch.) Everyone hates DRM? Spin it! (Then drop DRM.) People are nervous about your antenna design? Spin it! And give ‘em a bumper. (But don’t change the antenna.)
What he said publicly was not necessarily a reflection of reality, it was whatever he thought would best position himself and his organization at that moment. In tech they called it a reality distortion field. In politics it’s called a day ending in -y. :-)
Obviously Apple did not have a problem with CD Baby because they did do the contract. And obviously they did not actually have a quality concern about the cheap $40 fee because they kept them even as it went to free.
It’s a classic small business supplier story: the big guys will do what works best for them and the little guy will have to deal with it in order to get the benefit. The most common example is how long most big businesses take to pay their small suppliers. It’s not intentionally malicious, just relative indifference. Like a big truck running over a raccoon because it’s so hard to swerve or stop.
- SilverBirch
Always worth remembering that as well as being an innovator, Steve Jobs was often a cruel and petty man.
- nobleach
Apple's playbook has always been to knock technology they don't have as "worthless" (Video Messaging, Copy/Paste on iPhone, ability to play multiple video formats on AppleTV, ability to encode WAV files into Apple AAC/M4P). I get that sitting in the meeting room, one would not want to piss off Steve Jobs. Real money/opportunities are sitting there on the table. But it sure would have been nice to say, "Man, this seems like the type of place that might employ a smart engineer or two.... How about you let me know when they figure out how to convert my dataset into something you can handle". Slide the paperwork back across the table, stand, button my top button of my suit jacket, say, "good day". The outcome would have been the same - Steve still would have changed his story into "we didn't want them". But in your mind, it would have been, "wow, I can't believe converting one format to another was such an arduous task".
- ghusto
And now remember this whenever you listen to absolutely anything coming out from Apple.
The pattern has been there since the 90s, but younger people fall for it. What they say is primarly PR, and any truth is a happy co-incidence.
- tim--
Ruthless.