“During the 12+ years I worked at Apple I never met with Steve Jobs for work purposes,” David Gelphman blogs. “Of course like all Apple employees I saw Steve in Caffé Macs or walking with Jony Ive around the courtyard inside the Infinite Loop campus. And of course there were Comm meetings that he would run. But I didn’t have any direct contact. Until…”
“In March 2010, just a couple of weeks before the iPad was due to be released publicly, I had a reason to contact Steve. A friend of mine was dying of liver disease and I was going to San Francisco to hopefully see and communicate with her while it was still possible,” Gelphman writes. “She was a friend from my Adobe days and was very much into technology. I thought it would be a treat for her to see an iPad. And I had one. But until the product was officially released I could not show it to anyone without permission from Apple management.”
“There was no way I was going to take the iPad with me unless Steve personally approved it. I knew that asking anyone in my direct management chain was a non-starter. I knew that nobody would take the risk,” Gelphman writes. “So I wrote Steve… 3 minutes after I sent my email I got a response… ‘OK.'”
Read more in the full article here.
wow. cool
Unless I’m missing something, the blog entry should simply be titled ‘Two Letters’ without ‘from Steve Jobs’. Only one was from Steve Jobs, and it was extremely brief.
In any case, it’s a nice, sad story. It’s astounding how Steve Jobs dealt with being in direct contact (via email anyway) with his employees. That’s leadership.
Two letters: O and K.
Derek is dyslexic.
Even if that were true, KO is still two letters. Think before you click.
Oh I am so drugged. Sorry! duh derek duh.
Well done Steve. Still miss you.
Where’s the second letter?
Isn’t English just great? A letter can be pages and pages of well thought prose or just a single symbol.
It’s a synecdoche. Other languages do have them, but I agree that English is an interesting beast in general.
Heart and Soul
darn. i was hoping the two letters sould be “F” and “U”.
A nice short story. Interestingly enough, the author’s name sounded vaguely familiar to me, although I couldn’t quite place why – – then in one of his other posts, it clicked: Dave was a moderator on INFO-MAC back in the 1980s and I had been a subscriber. Thanks to you, Sir, for all you’ve done over many many years.
-hh
Seriously? Jobs was too busy to sympathise and also give an answer. Probably easier to say Ok than to listen to this sob story. It’s a lovely gesture and a sad story but Jobs wasn’t Jesus Christ for goodness sake.