Feed: The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs - AggScore: 82.3

We read the blogs, so you don't have to. From the FSJ News Center: Firefox celebrates a milestone on Monday. EMI to offer on-the-spot concert recordings.  The top iPhone apps of the week.   Voilà, the Apple Store opens today in the City of Light. Amusez-vous bien, les Parisiens!

Marissa. Sitting on a big..red..ball. (Gizmodo)

Parisians welcome their first Apple Store, opening today at the Louvre.  (Meanwhile, the Windows 7 store is here.  Très chic, n'est-ce pas?)  (Fast Company)

How do you replace a MacBook hard drive?  Carefully.
(Wired)

Monday is Firefox's five-year birthday. Take a look at the innovative browser that re-ignited the "browser wars." (Webmonkey)

Great Idea Of The Week Award Goes To: EMI and their instant-concert concept.  (CNET News)

The week's top iPhone apps, right here. (Gizmodo)

Apple to launch Verizon iPhone in Q3 2010?  (everythingiCafe)

The iPhone comes to the Shack.  (MacRumors)

U2's Bono guarantees he won't get a Christmas gift from FSJ, by singing to Bill Gates for his 54th birthday. Oh, and one more thing- see Dear Leader's Greatest Hits here. Windows 7 release does nothing to stop the Apple juggernaut. Chinese iPhone launch wasn't a total disaster. Some fellow named Ken Segall says he invented the name "iMac." Finally, El Jobso exercises his classic, trademark humility in humbly declining the "CEO Of The Decade" award.

We read the blogs, so you don't have to. From the FSJ News Center: It's the Day Of The Droid, right on Google's front page. Speaking of Google, CEO Eric Schmidt says he won't make the same mistakes Microsoft did. The battle over Skype has concluded. Apple opens a new store in Paris tomorrow, and NYC a week from tomorrow.

Today's Droid Day, and Arrington digs it. How much?  Key quote: "Yes, this is an unabashed love letter to the Droid."  (TechCrunch)

Google pitching Droid on the front page, along with Bert and Ernie. Archived money quote from Marissa Mayer: "There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever."  (All Things Digital)

This fellow at Wired wants to dump his iPhone and AT&T, but isn't going to get a Droid. (Wired)

Google's Eric Schmidt appears on Fox, and says his shop won't make the same errors Redmond did. (GigaOM)

Do you know who Martin Cooper is?  You should.  He's the man credited with inventing the modern cell phone.  He thinks today's models are "too complicated."  (Telegraph)

Microsoft tops Google, Yahoo! and Facebook in worldwide Web use.  (SeattlePI)

Web auction giant eBay settles suits over Skype.  (Barrons)

OK, last Google story, promise.  Larry Page and his wife have a tax deduction baby boy.  (Valleywag)

Only 48 shopping days until Christmas!  Layaway comes to the Apple Store.  (MacRumors)

The first Paris Apple Store opens  tomorrow.  (Reuters)

The Big Apple gets a new Apple Store November 14. (Fortune Brainstorm Tech)

Facebook, 325 million strong and growing.  (All Facebook)

What do Apple, actress Sarah Jessica Parker, and rapper Lil' Wayne have in common?  (AppleInsider)

On his boat, I mean. The big super duper racing boat that he wants to put into the America's Cup. The thing has a 200-foot mast and it snapped like a toothpick. No word on what the cause was, but it appears to be that they attached a sail to the mast and the sail filled with wind. Who knew? All I can say is, Maybe God really does exist, after all. Video after the jump.

 

That was the headline on the best PR pitch we've seen in ages, and which we just now got our hands on. One of the filthiest hacks on the beat has been trying to curry favor with Katie, and she's playing along, pretending to be his friend, hoping we can maybe use him for something at some point. Katie calls this her "back pocket strategy," meaning it's always good to keep a few of these frigtards in your back pocket in case you need them someday. Anyway, this hack just got an incredible story pitch from IBM, the gist of which is that every company in tech is trying to imitate IBM. The hack passed the pitch along to us, and now we're passing it along to you. Because sooner or later someone is going to bite on this story idea, and you're going to see it pop up someplace, with lots of glossy photos and quotes from analysts and IBMers. And maybe this will give you some idea how the sausage gets made. Enjoy.

What makes this interesting is that the Original Borg has been incredibly secretive and quiet in recent years. Seen any stories about Sam Palmisano lately? Seen his picture on the cover of any big business mags? The guy does not give interviews. Neither do any of his top reports. The place is locked down. But suddenly now they're going around pitching a big feature story that they'd like someone to write and offering access to senior management.
Surely this couldn't be because one of IBM's top executives, the guy who was supposed to be the next CEO, just got pinched for insider trading, could it? Nah. Surely the flacks at IBM wouldn't be stupid enough to try a distraction campaign. Because surely no publication would fall for that. Ahem.

So the gist of the pitch is, in light of HP buying EDS, and Dell buying Perot Systems, and Xerox buying ACS, there's only one conclusion:

When you cut through the "synergy's speak" and the bombastic rhetoric, a common and overwhelming truth emerges. The challenged makers of PC's, Printers and Copiers are in a frenetic race to be ... IBM.

Yup. That's it. Everyone wants to be like IBM. Big, lumbering and fucktarded, with no product innovation in the past 20 years; earnings propped up by financial engineering; profits goosed by carrying over surpluses in the pension plan; numbers made by selling off pieces of the company, bit by bit; aggressive cost-cutting by moving thousands of jobs to India; retirees screwed out of their benefits -- yup, there's a fucking bright shining city on a hill, a model for every company in the world to imitate.

Better yet is IBM's frat-house management team who all walk around acting like they're a bunch of Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy type guys. Straight shooters. Stand-up guys. The kind of guys who have a firm handshake and look you right in the eye. Fair and square.

Ugh. I just threw up in my mouth. Hold on.

If you want to see the full version of the pitch letter you can find it here. I didn't want to fill up this post with the whole thing because it's pretty long. But it's also pretty hilarious reading, especially if you've ever wondered how those big features on giant companies end up in your magazine.

Little hint: The companies think them up themselves, and put together a complete package, with charts and statistics, phone numbers for analysts and "independent observers" (all of them fully prepped and totally on message) -- and then, when they've got the whole thing wrapped up with ribbons and bows, they go looking for a hack to write it up for them.

What makes this case especially ridiculous is that the hack who passed us this pitch has had a somewhat rocky relationship with the Original Borg. In fact, this hack was once on an O.B. blacklist, blocked out so severely that once, by accident, an outside agency invited him to an IBM event and when he showed up, panicked IBM flacks shuttled him off to a room by himself and kept him waiting there for an hour or so and then finally told him they couldn't schedule any interviews today, sorry.

Another time the two top flacks at IBM actually met with the top two editors at this hack's publication and demanded that the editors remove this hack from the IBM beat. Another times, an O.B. exec and his minions orchestrated letter-writing campaigns against this hack, bombarding the hack's publications with letters denouncing him. The O.B. exec wrote his own letters to the publication, too, and in his he demanded that the hack should be terminated.

Now they want a favor. Funny how that shit comes around, isn't it?

And now, for only $4,500, you can buy a limited-edition book that tells the story of how they built Larry's super-dooper special rich guy race car entirely out of aluminum. The book itself sports an aluminum cover. Groan.


From the book's introduction:

Later, in the spring of 2006, Larry called. He was determined to commission a unique car but didn't quite know what he wanted. The conversation drifted: Chopin Polonaises, Mountain Gorilla protection in Rwanda, sailing, the War on Terror, his love of classical guitar.

Let me tell you something. Larry does like classical guitar. And he does like sailing. But that bit about protecting gorillas in Rwanda? Um, no. Hunting them, maybe. Making videos of them having sex, maybe. And the stuff about the Chopin polonaise? Please. Larry doesn't know polonaise from mayonnaise. But if you told him you had some polonaise, and that it cost a million bucks for a tiny bottle, and hardly anyone in the world could get their hands on it because there was only one chef in the whole world that made it and he worked out of this little kitchen in a remote village in the French Alps and to get there you had to ride a donkey to the top of a mountain -- well, he'd be all over that. He'd buy up every bottle you could get him, and then he'd buy a special custom-made refrigerator from some company in Japan and he'd use that refrigerator just to store his fancy pants polonaise spread.

Yeah. Like I told him when I saw the aluminum car, Why don't you just put on a big red wig and red rubber nose and a clown suit and drive around town in a Volkswagen Beetle with the top down? Seriously, dude. Buy yourself a nice Mercedes, in silver, loaded up with all the extras, and just be done with it.

Our favorite fanboy hack, David "I'm Not a Journalist" Pogue, goes on CNBC to talk about the Droid, and practically drools over the nav package and the home dock. He says the iPhone is kind of "simple" compared to Droid, and that Droid won't drop your calls in New York and California "like iPhone and ATT do." Worst of all, when asked which he would choose, the iPhone or the Droid, he waffles and says, "It's tough." Um, David? That was not the correct answer. See the horrifying video after the jump.

That's the headline from HuffPo about some new survey comparing iPhone users to BlackBerry users. FWIW, the guy in the photo above is actually a Linux user, but whatever. I couldn't resist.

I know what you're thinking -- because the story of Apple's greatness over the past decade is not just about one man, there were loads of people responsible and I don't want to claim all the credit for myself. But, um, no. It's not that. If it were just that I'd have no problem at all.

Or maybe you're thinking that it's because I simply feel I don't deserve the award, considering the way I was perhaps a little less than transparent with the media and to shareholders and tampered with stock awards and threw one of my best friends under a bus to save my ass. But, um, nope. Not that. Or maybe you think it's just that I think it's totally cool to turn down awards, which is true, I totally do think that. But again, that's not the reason.

The problem is, when Adam from Fortune called and told Katie that they wanted to name me the CEO of the Decade, we all said exactly the same thing at the same time: Just a decade? We went back and forth on it for a while and finally Adam said his bosses just would not go along with calling me the CEO of the Century, since it would not even be clear which century we were talking about, and if it was the last century then what was the point of writing about it now, and the whole point was to do a story about the decade that is just ending, and we came back and said okay how about best CEO of the past quarter century, and again we got hit with this thing about the premise being just to talk about the decade that's ending -- so fine.

We went along, and we worked out terms, like: you can only say positive things, you can't mention the liver, you can't mention the cancer, you can't mention the backdating, you can't mention the G4 Cube, you can't use pictures of me in this outfit or during my Rob Reiner-slash-Richard Dreyfuss phase, you can't mention Microsoft or IBM or Google, you can't do any riffs off the the "I'm a Mac" campaign, and so forth. They're like, If we do all that what's left for us to write about? Katie was like, Hey, You're the ones who want to do a story, not us. And, also, here's who you can talk to -- Larry and Bill Campbell, and nobody else. No Steve, because he despises you. No Woz, because God knows what he'd come up with. No Gates, no Al Gore, no Bono. You get Larry Ellison and Bill Campbell, and you can only contact them via email, and we're going to write their comments for them, and that's it. Oh, and we get to read the whole story in advance and make any corrections.

So fine. Adam agrees to ground rules. And then what do he do? He calls Ken Segall, the ad guy who dresses like me and goes around taking credit for my work. Then he calls other people who talk on the condition of anonymity. He cribs some comments from books and magazine interviews, which, okay, doesn't violate the letter of the agreement but certainly violates the spirit.

They send us the article and we're like, No way. No. Fucking. Way. We send them our corrected version, which excises all the stuff that's infringing, and you know what they do? They go, Thanks for the corrections, we're going to run our original version instead. We remind them of our agreement and their lawyers say, Yeah, we said you could make corrections. We didn't say we'd use them. So make all the corrections you want, but there's nothing in the deal that says you can halt publication. We're like, Yes there is. They're like, No there isn't, and besides, it was all verbal between you and Lashinsky and that agreement, frankly, isn't worth the paper that it isn't printed on.

So they fucked us. Katie is livid. One of her junior flacks tried to calm her down and said, Look, it's a total puff piece, it's a great story, most people would kill for coverage like this -- and Katie had to be torn off her. It's bad. Really.

We read the blogs, so you don't have to. From the FSJ News Center: Google releases zippy new Chrome beta, and an account privacy manager called Dashboard.  Layoffs get Real.  Windows 7 sales outpace Vista. His Honor says hello to Beatles MP3 seller.

The new Chrome beta is really fast. (Yeah, gotta run Windows.) (PC World)

Mozilla plans Firefox UI update that sounds a bit like that Google browser.  (Computerworld)

The artist behind Windows 7.  (Gizmodo)

Apple wants a new sheriff in town to handle iPhone security.  (Apple Insider)

As Facebook ages, Gen Y turns to Twitter.  As if.  (Read Write Web)

Manage all your Google stuff better with their new Dashboard. (TechCrunch)

Layoffs hit RealNetworks.  (CNET News)

Facebook developer discovers security flaw in Facebook and MySpace.   (TechCrunch)

Windows 7 proving to be more popular than Vista. (How can that be?)  (CNET News)

If a house could have as cool a design as an iMac, it would look like this.  (Gizmodo)

Remember the Beatles MP3 seller?  Bad day for them.  (And what exactly is "psycho-acoustic simulation?"  The judge didn't know, either.)  (Ars Technica)

It's amazing, the nerve of these ad guys. This one is named Ken Segall and yes, he worked for us for a while, and now he's going around claiming that he invented our slogan, "Think Different," and that he invented the name "iMac." To make it spicier, he tells Cult of Mac that when he first came up with the name iMac, I didn't like it, and wanted to call the computer something else -- something that was so awful that it would "curdle your blood." Good Lord. What's next? My guess is he'll claim I got the idea for the black mock turtleneck from him too. Truth is, I got the BMT (tm) from Larry Ellison, who used to rock this look all the time, sometimes in combination with a Caesar haircut.

But I changed BMT a bit by dropping the sport jacket, adding jeans and sneakers, and wearing it every single fucking day of my life. See, that's the genius. It's the repetition. That's why I was able to get a patent on the combination. I even have pajamas in the same combination: blue bottoms, black top, and special sneakers that I only wear at home, like slippers. I know it's weird. But at this point I've been doing it for so long that if I stop dressing this way then it will draw all sorts of crazy attention and speculation, and the bloggers will go nuts with it, and everyone will be wondering if something is wrong, or what does this mean, and on and on and on. So I'm stuck with it. Forever. Well, it's my cross to bear.

We read the blogs, so you don't have to. From the FSJ News Center: A look at the evolution of MSN.com. CNET UK proudly proclaims the iPhone to be the worst phone in the world..something to do with ninjas. Layoffs at Microsoft.  Apple promoting music + movies.  Mozilla says Firefox 3.6 is on schedule.  A new gizmo that tweets. That's all it does.

Baby, you can drive my car- with your iPhone.  (Life) 

MSN has received a much-publicized facelift. Here's what the page has looked like over time. (MSN Blog)

Verizon doubling early termination charge.  (Yahoo! Tech)

CNET UK does not have a high opinion of the iPhone's phone quality. Key quote to look for- "The tiny speaker has to be aligned with your ear canal with the accuracy of a laser-guided ninja doing cataract surgery." You have to admit, that is clever.  (CNET UK)

Layoffs at Microsoft, says Todd Bishop. (TechFlash)

As time goes by: President Obama's top BlackBerry moments. (Huffington Post)

The forgotten co-founders of tech. (Ronald Wayne, anyone?) (Business Insider)

Meet the fellow who thinks different and named the iMac.  (He also adds that at times, El Jobso "freaks out.")  Bonus quote: "Apple-  it’s about changing the world. For everyone else, it's about the money.”  (Cult Of Mac)

Remember the story we mentioned about a site selling Beatles tunes online?  EMI read that story, too.  (Wired) (Suit details here, requires PDF reader)

Apple planning a music + movie push on iTunes.  (iLounge)

Texas woman sues Facebook for privacy violations. (Fox News)

Mozilla promises the latest Firefox before the end of 2009.  (CNET News)

Apple App Store: Over 100,000 served. (The iPhone Blog)

Scared of flying? Well, grip your iPhone tight and punch the iPanic button. Or something. Sir Richard Branson launches his very own app. (Yahoo! News)

PayPal could soon overshadow parent eBay.  (USA Today)

Google News adds new customization feature. Pretty handy.  (Search Engine Land)

Here's a new gizmo that tweets. No email, no phone. It...just...tweets. (Say like William Shatner for the full effect.)  (Crave/CNET News)

Victim In Fatal Car Accident Tragically Not Glenn Beck
And I just point them to this video and go, Yeah, what they said.

We read the blogs, so you don't have to. From the FSJ News Center: T-Mobile is MIA.  Guess which tech CEO grabbed the biggest one-time bonus in the past decade?  Fake town surfaces on Google Maps.  Hacker breaks into iPhones, then asks for cash.  Beatles tunes sold online...does Yoko know about this?  Own your own Star Trek shuttle. Layoffs to hit Time Inc. tomorrow.  Facelift for MSN.

T-Mobile is in a world of hurt.  The natives are restless, and Twitter goes bananas.  (CNET News)

Man tries to pay T-Mobile bill online and gets, um, breasts.  T-Mobile says this is "not common."  Well, that explains it, then.  (Huffington Post)

New MSN logo and page revamp due tonight  (Boomtown) 

China approves a Disneyland for Shanghai. (Hmmm.  And just now, the iPhone goes on sale there.  Coincidence, or synergy power-play from El Jobso?)  (WSJ) 

More on spam than you ever wanted to know.  (Time.com)

Newly discovered Safari bug could translate into big iPhone fees.  (TechCrunch)

AT&T sues Verizon over ad campaign.  (SF Gate)

A review of the Motorola Droid.  (Gizmodo)

How can a fake town show up in Google Maps?  Good question!  (Valleywag)

Hacker breaks into jailbroken iPhones, then asks for money. (CNET News)

Philly gets an Apple Store.  Now they need a couple of more W's in the Series.  (Metro International)

The Fab Four are being sold online.  And not by iTunes.  (Ars Technica)

More on the lads from Liverpool, from Peter Kafka.  (All Things Digital)

Yahoo! EVP Ash Patel taking some time off from Big Purple.  (Boomtown)

Chrome grabs more market share in October than Firefox.  (Business Insider)

NBC cranks up their Olympic website.  (There's an Olympics coming?  Who knew?)  (TechCrunch)

Dear Leader has done quite well in the last decade.  (Business Insider) (CNBC)

Twitter es ahora en Español.  (TechCrunch)

Four words.  "Beam me up, Scotty."  (Gizmodo) (More here)

Layoffs to hit Time Inc. tomorrow.  (Business Insider)