You would have thought that even a hack from “The Daily Fail” would be competent enough to do basic research, and subsequently figure out that a Twitter account they plan to quote, and report as belonging to Steve Jobs, was actually a spoof account…
In the annals of blown calls, it ranks somewhere between the publishers who turned down the first Harry Potter book and baseball umpire Jim Joyce’s instantly infamous perfect-game flub last week. It was the spring of 1985, and the board of Apple Computer decided it no longer needed the services of one Steven P. Jobs.
I hate ads. I hate ads on websites. I hate ads in apps. I hate ads on TV. In fact I even boycott certain products and websites if their ads annoy me sufficiently. What is funny is that even Ars’ own writers hate ads! I have ads here on this site. If you want to click on them feel free. If you don’t, or want to block them, that’s cool too. I won’t complain either way.
Now onto Ken Fisher’s op-ed tripe over at ars technica. A site I love by the way, but whose growing propensity for having more and more intrusive ads in their content over the last year or so I find increasingly objectionable :
So the company that has made an advertising platform a major part of its iOS strategy is also hawking an ad-blocking technology for its Web browser, where it has no stake in ads. App Store: use our unblockable ads, developers! They help you get paid for your hard work! Web: hey, block some ads, readers! They’re annoying!
If Developers put adverts into paid apps they are not going to be popular. People will vote with their wallets on that one. Apple has also clearly stated, on more than one occasion that it will not approve apps which are blatantly vehicles for Ads.
Apple, to me, seem to have a better grasp on how annoying ads can be than the management at Ars.
What’s more, most web users and responsible designers tend to agree that intrusive ads on the web are annoying. Whilst most app designers and users tend to also be in agreement that if you want an app for free you must tolerate ads. If you pay then you shouldn’t.
Ars obviously have an agenda here because they depend on web ads for their revenue, apparently despite having sold out to Condé Nast a while back. Condé Nast, by the way, is the same company that also brings us the ad-fest that is Wired (among other websites). Wired barely loads in Safari for me anymore as it stumbles over a virtual scrap yard of Flash and other garish advertising blocks so big and resource intensive that they often swamp 75% of my HD monitor, and the same percentage of my day to day work machine’s available CPU load! It is worth noting that Ars didn’t have anywhere near so many ads before it was bought by Condé. Nor was it so defensive of them either.
So in the end we’re left with a) an open platform where Apple is willing to toy with Web publishers, modify their content presentation, and suppress their ads, and b) Apple’s curated, closed platform, where everything is done by Apple’s rules or it’s not done at all.
A few people responded to Ken’s article stating that the idea behind iAd is that it is less invasive when compared to advertising solutions like AdMob, as ads can be viewed without quitting an application. (Something that AdMob could do too if they simply refined their free Framework, and talked to developers using their service.)
[Ken's] response: if the ads are so great that no one in their reasonable mind would block them, then Apple should give us the ability to block them and put this conviction to the test. What’s the risk? Apple gives users the ability to make the call on websites. Give users the ability to make the call on Apps.
… Rupert Murdoch’s paean to Jobs the other day, proclaiming Jobs the nation’s best chief executive (Murdoch used to say this about Gates when he was trying to do deals with him), comes after a number of years in which a preferred Murdoch subject was the state of Jobs’ health: “Boy, oh boy, he’s a real goner,” is how I remember Murdoch putting it, quite, it seemed, with some relish.
Classy.
Murdoch’s kind words for him now—as opposed to his questions not just about Jobs’ physical but also mental health in the past—are part of everybody’s desperate effort to suck up to the guy who controls the only game.
Exactly. Murdoch is a completely different animal from Jobs. He’s unimaginative, ambitious for power for power’s sake, greedy and unscrupulous. He wouldn’t spill his cocktail on you to save you if you were on fire, whereas Jobs just might!
Murdoch is transparent, and largely disingenuous. Jobs is simply brusque.
Murdoch is desperate to continue growing his clone media empire, and realise a revenue stream from the internet for his rags. Something he has consistently failed at, whilst earning ridicule from denizens of the very network he wants dominion over. Murdoch would quite probably sell his first born to achieve this control, if necessary. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, Apple is the only game in town. So it’s silver tongue time. Jobs must find this all very amusing. He is not vain enough in that way to fall for this rubbish. But hey, business is business.
Murdoch may not be right about Jobs being the nation’s best chief executive, but Jobs may be the most powerful. He is, at this point, even more powerful in his universe than Murdoch in his, which is saying something.
We may never before have had a single executive in a public company who is so personally powerful.
Is this good news?
If we need a gatekeeper for media, you had better hope it is Jobs over Murdoch every time. For all of our sakes.
I’m not so sure that Jobs thinks his Macintosh strategy failed. I think the way Jobs looks at it is this: he built a beautiful, revolutionary machine in the Macintosh, attracted incredible hype for it and passionate early adopters.
And then he got fired.
…
So in Jobs’ mind, I suspect it’s not that he’s making the same mistake all over again. Instead, he’s proving that his original decision wasn’t a mistake in the first place.
I don’t think Jobs is consciously doing any of this. But I do think he has always believed very strongly in his vision. Perhaps more than he’s cared about market share. But not necessarily more than he cares about money…
In some ways I think that Jobs is kind of a frustrated artist. Much in the way that Napoleon was a frustrated tall person. Don’t get me wrong, I admire Jobs, and think he has great vision. But I also think he is compensating for something somewhere, as many truly talented people tend to. That is where his insane drive comes from. He is certainly not an “artist” in the generally accepted meaning of the word. But he does feel that what he produces is art. And quite often it is.
There’s a quite different view of Jobs in this article I referred to earlier today, here :
“He probably won’t like me for saying this, but I think he got caught up in the business of business. He became so enamored with succeeding at this stuff that he began doing it for the sake of itself. He began making money for the sake of making money. What can somebody do with $200 million that they can’t do with $100 million?”
…
But in those early days the free-spirited Woz was reluctant to commit himself, and it was driving Jobs crazy. “There were bits and pieces of the circuit for the Apple computer that Wozniak wanted to use in other places,” Wayne recalls. “Jobs said, ‘You can’t do that. This is the property of Apple Computer.’ He had an awful time with Woz because of the difference in their personalities.”
…
Jobs immediately plunged the company into debt, agreeing to fill an order for 50 computers from the Byte Shop in Mountain View, then borrowing $5,000 cash and parts worth $15,000. Wayne was impressed with Jobs as a promoter — “His psyche was already fully matured,” he says — but was astonished to discover huge gaps in his new partner’s knowledge of electronics, such as aluminum’s ability to conduct electricity. “I almost lost my uppers,” says Wayne.
Overall, one thing is very clear…
Woz, always was, and will forever be the guy who was more about making toys than Steve ever was.
Now, that last line reminds me of a poem about a bear…
These days, Wayne sells stamps, rare coins and gold out of his home to supplement his monthly government check. When his precious metal clients drop by, he straps on a .38 caliber Police Special, just in case one of them tries to rob him. He has never owned an Apple computer, or any Apple product, and when Wayne recently bought his first desktop, it was a Dell. It’s been years since he last heard from Jobs.
UPDATE : Of course the video focusses on Flash. *yawn*
Overall a very frank interview. Walt asked most of the questions we expected, and Steve gave the replies to match.
Steve’s performance? In my opinion, overall there was about 33.3% from the heart, 33.3% PR, and 33.3% complete RDF.
Here are a few key of the key sound-bytes that were amusing and insightful for me :
I had this idea about having a glass display, a multitouch display you could type on. I asked our people about it. And six months later they came back with this amazing display. And I gave it to one of our really brilliant UI guys. He then got inertial scrolling working and some other things, and I thought, ‘my god, we can build a phone with this’ and we put the tablet aside, and we went to work on the phone.
It was always fairly obvious, to me anyway, that a tablet type device prototype would have proceeded the iPhone. If for no other reason than building something slightly larger is going to be much easier. But it was nice to have it confirmed.
Mosberg asked about Mark Fiore’s app that got rejected, and the App Store gnomes approval guidelines…
Yes… and political cartoons got caught in that. We didn’t think of that. So this guy submits his app and he gets rejected. We didn’t see that coming. So we changed the rule, but this guy never resubmitted… then he wins a Pulitzer Prize, and he says we rejected him. So, we are guilty of making mistakes. We’re doing the best we can, we’re learning as fast as we can — but we thought this rule made sense.
We’re doing the best we can, we’re fixing mistakes. But what happens is — people lie. And then they run to the press and tell people about this oppression, and they get their 15 minutes of fame. We don’t run to the press and say “this guy is a son of a bitch liar!” — we don’t do that.
Taking all the hyperbole out of the story, this at least puts Apple’s side. Love the way that the jibe, without directly insulting someone gets thrown in.
Next they touched on Gizmodo and the whole iPhone 4G debacle..
You know, when this whole thing with Gizmodo happened, I got advice from people who said ‘you gotta just let it slide, you shouldn’t go after a journalist just because they bought stolen property and tried to extort you.’ And I thought deeply about this, and I concluded the worst thing that could happen is if we change our core values and let it slide. I can’t do that. I’d rather quit.
This reply from Steve actually made me wonder if he had thought about, and almost decided to just let it go. Again, I did love the way he managed to work in the theft and extortion jibe!
In both cases we know a lot more about how Steve feels personally on these issues than we did before. He then tempers all that by waxing lyrical about what a great place, and a great team Apple is.
Nothing makes my day more than getting a random email from someone talking about how cool the iPad is. That’s what keeps me going. That’s what kept me going back then, and now, and will keep me going in the future.
That I believe.
One of the keys to Apple is that Apple is an incredibly collaborative company. You know how many committees we have at Apple? Zero. We’re organized like a startup. We’re the biggest start up on the planet. We meet for 3 hours every morning and talk about all the business, about what’s going on everywhere. We’re great at figuring out how to divide things up into great teams, and we talk to each other. So what I do all day is meet with teams of people.
I have one of the best jobs in the world. I get to come in and work with some of the most brilliant people in the world. We play in the best sandbox…
That too.
Well we think their ad delivery system sucks!
On AdMob.
The problem with innovation in the TV industry is the go to market strategy. The TV industry has a subsidized model that gives everyone a set top box for free. So no one wants to buy a box. Ask TiVo, ask Roku, ask us… ask Google in a few months.
Interesting. It will be fun to see how this pans out for Google…
Steve followed up by kind of dismissing the idea of putting hardware inside a TV. We all know what a denial from Steve normally means, don’t we?
There was also a defence of AT&T, but not a denial of an additional service provider moving forward.
