Dan Lyons did a great take on what's going on over at Apple. The arrogant tone is wearing thin and could just come back to bite them. Frankly, arrogance bores me.
Dan gets it right. I've seen many companies that were incredibly hot try this tack. It works for awhile - it may even be considered amusing by some. But once they get cold - and everyone does - they've used up their pool of goodwill.
Oh, by the way - there's no 'off the record' anymore. Never, and I mean never, say something to a journalist that you don't want to see in print. If you do, you're fooling yourself and being unrealistic about the journo's job.
Here's the excerpt....zip down for the link...
"Best part of Joe Nocera’s article from yesterday’s New York Times (“Apple’s Culture of Secrecy”) was, of course, the quote from Steve Jobs, the one where Nocera picks up the phone and Jobs hits him with this opening line: “This is Steve Jobs. You think I’m an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law, and I think you’re a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong.”
In other words: Classy.
And just the kind of thing you’d expect from the CEO of a large, publicly traded company, right?
One thing that stuck with me was the expletive. I keep wondering, which word did he use? My picks, in no particular order, would be dick, prick, fuck or fucker. Maybe he used something bland, like bastard, but from what I’ve heard about Jobs, I doubt it.
It also struck me as classic Jobs, in that what he said was rude and obnoxious but also, oddly enough, highly perceptive. In one sentence Jobs managed to speak the essential truth about himself and Joe Nocera.
How many times do you think Jobs rehearsed that opening line before he dialed (or had Katie Cotton dial for him)? I’d say he practiced it one hundred times. And I’d say Katie was definitely on the line with him, though she probably pretended not to be. Furthermore, I’d bet a signed dollar bill that Apple recorded the phone call, just in case Nocera decided to run the stuff that Steve gave him under their “off the record” agreement."
Full post here.
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