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Steve Jobs to those responsible for MobileMess: ‘You should hate each other’

Sunday, May 8, 2011 · 1:24 pm · 31 Comments

“Adam Lashinsky’s ‘Inside’ story in the new issue of Fortune is packed with juicy revelations,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune. “After the simultaneous, and more-or-less disastrous, launch of the iPhone 3G and MobileMe in the summer of 2008 — the launch one Gizmodo reader dubbed ‘iPocalypse’ — Steve Jobs summoned the MobileMe team to the Town Hall auditorium on Apple’s Cupertino campus for an obscenity-laden dressing down. ‘You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation,’ he told them. ‘You should hate each other for having let each other down.’ Then he named a new executive on the spot to run the team.”

P.E.D. reports, “That’s the lead anecdote of ‘Inside Apple,’ Adam Lashinsky’s feature story in the new issue of Fortune — available to subscribers on the iPad. It’s an anecdote I’d never heard before, one of dozens of juicy details that Lashinsky — who wrote the definitive profile of Apple COO Tim Cook in 2008 — managed to extract from the secretive company through several months of old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting.”

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Comment Feed

31 Comments

Mark S.

Sunday, May 8, 2011 - 1:42 pm · Reply

Juicy, yes.
True? Maybe not so much.
Menow

Sunday, May 8, 2011 - 2:03 pm · Reply

That’s weird. I thought being nice to people when they screw up was the best business strategy?
- Michael A. Robson
  
  Sunday, May 8, 2011 - 7:50 pm · Reply
  
  lol
castlebuono

Sunday, May 8, 2011 - 3:02 pm · Reply

“and MobileMe in the summer of 2008 — the launch one Gizmodo reader dubbed ‘iPocalypse’ ”

…more like iJobcalypse. Based on results, there is little to argue about SJ’s management style – the man knows how to attract top talent, create inner circle chemistry, and produce game changing products on a global scale.
BoC

Sunday, May 8, 2011 - 3:25 pm · Reply

Learn from those who do.
Nightfly

Sunday, May 8, 2011 - 3:32 pm · Reply

Lets wait till we see the next incarnation of Mobile Me before we can say whether Steve Jobs lecturing and reassigning of personal actually work.
Who knows if the story is true, as long as Apple produce a quality product at a reasonable price is all that matters. $99 seem kind of high for what they where offering. May be the problem is in the marketing department, wonder what Jobs said to them.
- would there have been ...
  
  Monday, May 9, 2011 - 11:26 am · Reply
  
  … as much of a problem if quite a few people didn’t feel that $99 was a fair price for the service? Sure, maybe not if you only used parts or didn’t mind ads or were happy spending your time tracking down alternative services you hoped were reliable. Here’s my latest posted out there:
  http://web.me.com/davidmeyer/MouthOffs/MouthOffs.html
Brau

Sunday, May 8, 2011 - 3:43 pm · Reply

The failure of MobileMe during the launch of the iPhone had the potential to blow Apple’s entire public image and possibly sink the best product in the last ten years. By getting angry at those who failed, Steve honored all those who had truly given their all to make the iPhone. Think about it; would you be happy if years of your hard work (many late nights) were unraveled by a few lazy jerks who work next to you? Would anyone be able to convince you to work that hard again? Those who critique Steve Jobs, saying there are nicer ways … are lazy idiots who work for average loser companies.
- Dave
  
  Sunday, May 8, 2011 - 4:47 pm · Reply
  
  I concur.
- Mike
  
  Sunday, May 8, 2011 - 11:00 pm · Reply
  
  Well said. So many think they know the first thing about running a successful business. Everyone should be motivated with positive praise? The most successful business’ have always been led by strong control and high expectations. Many don’t like it but leaders don’t and shouldn’t be concerned with praise from everyone.
X

Sunday, May 8, 2011 - 5:47 pm · Reply

if so, sounds like Jobs is a cry baby adolescent. Did someone change his diapers for him?
Bonkers

Sunday, May 8, 2011 - 6:27 pm · Reply

@ X — Have a nice day, TROLL
- Dmitri
  
  Sunday, May 8, 2011 - 6:41 pm · Reply
  
  Lol!
GM

Sunday, May 8, 2011 - 7:34 pm · Reply

Just like when Woz did all the work and Steve got all the credit.
- Spark
  
  Monday, May 9, 2011 - 12:54 am · Reply
  
  If designing circuitry, even brilliant circuitry, was ALL the work needed to build a company, there would be tens of thousands of engineers running billion dollar companies. Doesn’t happen. Different talents. Woz did something special, but if not for Jobs, very few would have ever known about it. It’s may be easy to demand perfection from others, but only one in a million can achieve it, and fewer than that can pull it off over a 30 year span. Jobs is one of those. Jobs always gives credit to the Apple employees that create the products. Jobs gets the credit for making those employees shine.
  - MacRaven
    
    Monday, May 9, 2011 - 8:53 am · Reply
    
    It’s like The Beatles. The individuals were never what the whole was.
The Joker

Sunday, May 8, 2011 - 7:42 pm · Reply

The sad thing today is that MobileMe is STILL an unmitigated disaster. I mean really, the list of things that Apple STILL cannot get to work right is just mind blowing. Just count the number of folks complaining about iDisk over at MobileMe’s support forums. Staggering, year after year after year. Sync? Give me a break.

MobileMe is now and perhaps always will be Apple’s most whiffed effort.
- J
  
  Sunday, May 8, 2011 - 8:02 pm · Reply
  
  I have had no problems with MM, including sync. With that said it’s features, especially w Mail, iDisk, and Address Book need a significant upgrade
  - dojonaise
    
    Sunday, May 8, 2011 - 9:45 pm · Reply
    
    i can agree, in fact mm works even better than some may think. I have noticed an interesting feature not mentioned in the mm marketing materials. You can put several kinds of video in your movie folder on mm and the server streams it to your device dynamically tailored to your device and bandwidth – pretty cool to have an extra 20 gigs of movies in the cloud, secured, watchable on the road traveling for work (read naughty flix). And it does not show up on my I-device when the kiddies are playing with it.
    - rwahrens
      
      Monday, May 9, 2011 - 9:23 am · Reply
      
      Agreed. they also added the over-the-air syncing of Notes, also, without a public announcement of it. I just create a Note on my Mac in Mail, and within seconds, that note appears in the Notes app on both my iPhone and iPad.
      
      Simple, easy and with NO effort.
- S. Balmy
  
  Monday, May 9, 2011 - 6:56 am · Reply
  
  Guess you’re too new to remember eWorld.
  
  “Spindler’s List”
  - Derek in Milan
    
    Monday, May 9, 2011 - 12:13 pm · Reply
    
    Hey! Dont knock eWorld – I really loved eWorld – it was a pioneer, and sadly, in internet world, the pioneers got the arrows and the settlers got the land…
- Dan Raul
  
  Monday, May 9, 2011 - 7:42 pm · Reply
  
  that’s why i sync to Google instead of MobileMe
MacRaven

Monday, May 9, 2011 - 8:51 am · Reply

Steve is tough and that’s what makes Apple great.

You can see what happens when the “Head Petting” and “It’s OK, you tried and that counts just as much as success” method is used. Just look at the kids in our U.S. schools. No one wants to challenge someone to be the best anymore, and mediocrity is rewarded as much as success.
- themusicdoc
  
  Monday, May 9, 2011 - 10:37 am · Reply
  
  Don’t generalize and lump all schools into one category. You obviously have not been in a lot of schools recently where the “gotta save that self-esteem” days are over. The building I teach in demands rigor and has high expectations of all students.
  - FTB
    
    Monday, May 9, 2011 - 12:07 pm · Reply
    
    and that would not be the norm either.
    I agree that there are good schools, and good teachers. But that would be mainly PRIVATE schools, not public.
    what was the story the other day? 47% of Detroit cant read?…
    http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2011/05/04/report-nearly-half-of-detroiters-cant-read/
    and its not just Detroit either
    http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/10939420/1-in-6-hawaii-adults-are-functionally-illiterate?redirected=true
    
    Off topic here, but there IS too much “you tried, thats all that counts”
    I’m glad that SJ did what he did, if true. That is the way it should be done.
- lern2kode, Steve.
  
  Monday, May 9, 2011 - 7:05 pm · Reply
  
  The problem is smug programmers who think they’re hot shit, but actually have no talent and don’t really understand programming.
  
  Which hits Steve right in his Achille’s heel. He’s not a programmer himself, so he can’t just take a look at some sourcecode and tell if its written by somebody competent or not. He can be snowed by the excuses of bad programmers, because how the hell does he know if the excuses are valid or not? He doesn’t know programming.
  
  So he kind of needs to. And then he needs to involve himself as deeply in programming as he’s involved in cosmetic and UI design. That way, things like the MobileMe fiasco wouldn’t happen because he’d know bad code when he sees it and kick shitty programmers in the face accordingly. BEFORE the bad code is compiled into a final product and another fiasco happens.
ATV2 sucks

Monday, May 9, 2011 - 10:58 am · Reply

What about Apple’s tarnished reputation for that seldom working turd… Apple TV2?
- FTB
  
  Monday, May 9, 2011 - 11:58 am · Reply
  
  say what?
  
  ATV2 works great here.
  only problem i have EVER had… the NETFLIX app has connectivity issues sometimes. just exit out and come back and it works. it’s netflix, NOT ATV2.
  
  as far as MM. i have it, and have never had an issue with it either. then again i didnt have it till late last year so i dont know about these problems it did have.
  But, SJ did the right thing.
- Derek in Milan
  
  Monday, May 9, 2011 - 12:16 pm · Reply
  
  Apple TV2 is a great device!
  Its the next big thing, when Blockbusters et al disappear, along with pointless DVD’s.
Abdullah

Monday, May 9, 2011 - 11:20 am · Reply

A lot of what Apple touches turns to gold. But nobody’s perfect, and the company seems to have problems when it tries to grapple with “cloudy/social-networky” stuff such as MobileMe and Ping. MobileMe will probably come good sooner or later, but making Ping competitive will probably be a bigger challenge.