Steve Jobs: the great communicator, though maybe not via email

Many of Steve Jobs's email replies came from his Apple iPhone. Photograph: Kimberly White/Reuters/Corbis

Steve Jobs may effectively be gone from Apple, but he is far from forgotten by those who worked inside and outside with him. His style in dealing with customers could be astonishingly blunt, yet never what you would call directly rude. His email address became known around the web, and people would contact him through it. Those emails began to be collected by various blogs.

And while Jobs might have been known as a great communicator when up on a stage in front of an audience, when dealing through email, "terse" barely begins to describe it. Here's a selection:

September 2010:
Customer: "Steve, Enjoyed the presentation today. But … this new iTunes logo really sucks. You're taking 10+ years of instant product recognition and replacing it with an unknown. Let's both cross our fingers on this…."
Jobs: We disagree.

June 2010:
Customer: "Any reason battery performance on a 3GS running iOS4 should be worse than it was running OS3?"
Jobs: Nope.

June 2010:
Customer: "Mr Jobs, Newsweek just ran an 'obituary' for the Mac saying the mac has been 'relegated to the steaming dung heap of the past'. I hope he's wrong. I believe and hope that the Mac will remain a vibrant, vital part of Apple's future and one of its (admittedly many) product lines. So, as you view it, does the mac have a long and important history ahead of it?"
Jobs: Completely Wrong. Just wait.

May 2010:
Customer: "Do you hate Adobe and their products (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc) or do you just hate their view on Flash?"
Jobs: I respect and admire Adobe. We just chose to not have Flash on our devices.

May 2010:
Customer: "Why no printing on the iPad? What gives?"
Jobs: It will come.

And then there was the entire thread between Jobs and Ryan Tate of Gawker in May 2010, in which Jobs suggested that the iPad and Apple Store combination offered "freedom from porn". (Context: Gawker's parent company faced legal charges over its display of the then-unreleased iPhone 4 prototype, and there had been some police presence at a Gawker writer's house in California.)

Here's how it went. Tate began:
"If [Bob] Dylan was 20 today, how would he feel about your company? Would he think the iPad had the faintest thing to do with 'revolution'? Revolutions are about freedom," Tate wrote after seeing an iPad advert.

Three hours later, Jobs replied: "Yep, freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. The times they are a changin', and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is."

There follow an argument about Flash, batteries, Objective-C, porn ("you might care more [about not having it] when you have kids", remarks Jobs), whether Apple has a private police force that kicked in a Gawker person's doors ("You are so misinformed," Jobs retorts. "No one kicked in any doors. You're believing a lot of erroneous blogger reports").

Jobs concludes: "Microsoft had (has) every right to enforce whatever rules for their platform that they want. If people don't like it, they can write for another platform, which some did. Or they can buy another platform, which some did.

"As for us, we're just doing what we can to try and make (and preserve) the user experience we envision. You can disagree with us, but our motives are pure."

And then a final, very Jobs-ish little parting shot:

"By the way, what have you done that's so great? Do you create anything, or just criticise others [sic] work and belittle their motivations?"

Yet Tate himself said that "came away from the exchange impressed with his willingness to engage". Tersely, of course.

View the original article here