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The comments were made during a town hall meeting. The person leading the town hall trashes a competitor who used to be a partner, and intemperate language may have been used. Another competitor who may yet end up as a partner is called "lazy." A media primed to snap up conflict and sensationalism does so, splashing the headlines all over -- just as the person who made the original comments may have suspected they would in the first place.
A particularly juicy chapter in the political bestselller "Game Change" describing the 2008 Obama and Clinton campaign machinations? No, just another slow weekend in techland, thanks to several reports describing what Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs said at a company gathering shortly after last week's launch of the iPad tablet device.
A traditional tech journalism outlet, Wired, gets credit for breaking the news first. Corroboration was provided by blogs MacRumors and Daring Fireball, which may have disputed the exact language used by Jobs -- did he really call Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) "don't be evil" mantra "a bunch of bulls**t" or just "a load of crap"? -- but backed up the core of the Wired article:
- Jobs says Google wants to kill the iPhone with its new Nexus One smartphone and the Android OS. Jobs is reportedly upset because Google got into the smartphone business even though Apple doesn't do search.
- Jobs called Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) lazy because it refuses to address bugs in its Flash media player -- the reason, Jobs says, that Apple won't support Flash for the iPhone and the new iPad. Besides, he added, the non-proprietary HTML5 format is the new new thing, so Flash's days are numbered anyway.
The Politics of Ranting
Apple wasn't the only company engaging in some netroots-based manueuvering recently. The Flash Blog -- run by an Adobe employee not authorized to speak on behalf of the company -- worked up some faux screen shots of what popular Web sites would look like on an iPad. Each image included copious white space where video should be -- the result, of course, of a lack of Flash support. However, one of the Web sites was that of an adult entertainment company. Was Adobe playing the porn card, as Apple's response implied?
Apple has set the bar very high, said Greg Sterling, principal of Sterling Market Intelligence and a contributing editor at Search Engine Land. That applies not just to the quality of its consumer electronics; Jobs' company also commands more than its share of technosphere/blogosphere coverage, and Jobs is aware of that. "Some of it is posturing and theater," Sterling told MacNewsWorld. "There's a big market in Apple rumors, and a lot of tech coverage has turned into gossip coverage." Words and comments that would have gone unreported in the past now make their way to the public because of the explosion of tech-based Web sites and blogs.
However, Jobs, long known for a mercurial temperament, may also be running a beta test of his own. "When the iPad launched, Apple got hit by all these people for not including features that they thought would be on this device -- a camera, Flash, etc. -- and they seem not impervious, but willing to face the kind of firestorm of criticism from the tech community to pursue their strategy or vision. It may be all about their time-to-market with iPad version 1, vs. version 2."
Bottom line, said Sterling: Jobs loves to rant, but he's also a "rational guy in the end who will make the deals and compromises necessary to succeed."
The Apple-Google Gulf
It may indeed be a different scenario with Google. Both Apple and Google are at the heart of the transition going on in the computing industry involving the cloud and an emphasis on mobile devices. Suddenly Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is the spectator, and Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt are the ones jockeying for early position in this new tech paradigm, Sterling said. Google is doing that by playing on Apple's traditional software/hardware turf.
"One of the interesting things to develop is the Chrome netbooks vs. the iPad question. Will they cost about the same? Chrome netbooks are being positioned as a second computer for people who don't need all the software. But more broadly, are netbooks going to be affected by tablets, or will netbooks continue to sell well? It's really fascinating is the whole landscape that's really being upended by mobile computing, and all these companies trying to figure out their place in all that."
