The iPad Tweet That Enraged Steve Jobs?

February 8th, 2010, 21:23 Posted By: wraggster

There was inevitably some cultural friction when Apple's secretive CEO took his new iPad around to New York's professionally indiscreet media. Exhibit A is a single tweet from a Wall Street Journal editor, which purportedly made Steve Jobs go ballistic:



The Journal's online executive editor Alan Murray quickly deleted the Feb. 4 tweet, which, it is now obvious, was issued during Apple CEO Jobs' show-and-tell with select Journal staff. A tipster told us the deletion ultimately traces back to a furious Jobs. We asked Murray for comment, and he wrote back "I would love to talk about this, but can't." In a later email, he added:

I will say that Apple's general paranoia about news coverage is truly extraordinary— but that's not telling you anything you didn't already know.
If Jobs did give Murray a tongue lashing — his withering verbal abuse is infamous — the editor can console himself with the knowledge that this is is an especially touchy time of year for the paranoiac. And not just because of the pressures of shepherding and unveiling a new product.

At Jobs' meeting at the Times, the CEO was mostly on point, painting a utopian picture of happy future world awash in iPads. But at one juncture in the meeting, we hear, he took a detour, telling assembled newspaper staff that he gets tons of hate mail from people whenever he launches a new product — people who have never even used it, including angry Apple "fans." Jobs reportedly described the mail as "really nasty stuff... [things] like '**** you and your family.'"

It sounds like Jobs has been fighting this sort of backlash his whole career, judging from this 1994 Rolling Stone interview:

"I've always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don't know why. Because they're harder. They're much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you've completely failed."
Of course, "**** you and your family" sound less like fanboys than regretful stock speculators. That's the sort of e-note to go ballistic over.

http://gawker.com/5466906/the-ipad-t...ged-steve-jobs

There are 0 comments - Join In and Discuss Here