Apple Tries To Kill London Sunday Times Piece About Steve Jobs…. Why? It’s A Good Read….

The London Sunday Times posted a very interesting profile of Apple God CEO Steve Jobs. It’s a very interesting read and I encourage you to take a look at it. What I found interesting is that Apple apparently tried to get the Sunday Times not to run the piece:

Apple hates personality stuff and press intrusion. “We want to discourage profiles,” an Apple PR tells me stiffly, apparently unaware she is waving a sackful of red rags at a herd of bulls. Another PR rings the editor of this magazine to try to halt publication of this piece.

That worked out really well. Great job Apple PR. Now everybody and their dog will be talking about this story. I know that Apple is a very insular and secretive company (and the piece goes into some amount of detail about that), but to tell one of the worlds best known media outlets to bury a story seems a bit much to me.

In any case, from my perspective this article has some negative things about “The Steve:”

Jobs is, in the words of the psychiatrist and scholar of leadership Michael Maccoby, “a productive narcissist”. To Jobs, the world is an epiphenomenon, a side effect of the existence of Steve. Or rather, it is a pyramid with Jobs at the top, a few bright people just beneath him, and then the rest of us — the “bozos”. The customer bozo is not, to him, always right.

And some positive as well:

“Jobs is not an engineer,” says the writer Dan Lyons, “he can’t really design anything and he doesn’t know anything about circuits. But he is the ultimate end-user, the guy who is on our side.” Lyons created the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs blog with a motto that captures the strange Jobs mix of geek fantasy and power: “I will restore your sense of childlike wonder. There is nothing you can do to stop me.”

So that says to me it’s a balanced article. What do you think? Please leave a comment with your thoughts.

Leave a Reply

%d bloggers like this: