Linked List: June 24, 2009

Wednesday, 24 June 2009

Why We Need Steve Jobs 

Dan Lyons nails it:

Cook is a great manager, a whiz when it comes to managing supply chains and keeping the trains running on time. He is vital to Apple. Jobs cannot do what he does. But neither can Cook do what Jobs does. The fact is, Apple needs both of them. Forgive me for the analogy I am about to make — but if you’ve seen the latest Star Trek movie, then you might understand how Cook and Jobs work together. Cook is Spock: low-key, cerebral, methodical. He’s the Apollonian counterpart to Kirk, the Dionysian hothead. Kirk is impulsive—but nobody would deny that he, not Spock, should be captain of the ship.

iPhone OS 3.0 Adoption Rate 

Very quick uptake; if I were an iPhone developer, I’d drop support for OS 2.2.

Claim Chowder: Brian X. Chen 

Brian X. Chen, on January 14, “Steve Jobs Probably Won’t Come Back to Apple”:

Steve Jobs’ medical leave from Apple is likely to be permanent, analysts say.

Melody 

Interesting: Melody is a new open source CMS/weblog system forked from Movable Type. The project was started and is driven by a group of top Movable Type developers.

South Carolina Governor and Appalachian Trail Devotee Mark Sanford Voted to Impeach Bill Clinton in 1998 

Sweet delicious schadenfreude, how I love thee.

Fake Steve on The New York Times’s Coverage of Real Steve 

The New York Times published a second piece on Steve Jobs yesterday, implying strongly that Steve Jobs somehow jumped the line and obtained a liver that should have gone to someone else. This article presents no evidence, and no quotes from anyone with knowledge of Jobs’s case. Is it any wonder that Jobs gave the scoop to The Wall Street Journal? This story is so scurrilous it has me thinking that the Times is coming apart at the seams.

After a long hiatus, Dan Lyons has turned the Fake Steve blog back on, and he has a terrific piece about the Times’s coverage:

“Whenever someone rich and famous receives a transplant, suspicions inevitably arise about whether that person managed to jump to the head of the waiting list and take an organ that might have saved the life of somebody just as desperate but less glamorous,” they say — only to assert, a paragraph later, that every doctor they talked to says there is no reason to cheat because these days anyone can pretty much sign up for a liver and get one.

There’s no evidence suggesting I cheated. Nobody is quoted in the story saying I cheated. There’s not a shred of anything in the actual story about that.

Lyons is ruthless on Brad Stone, as well. Deservedly so — if John Markoff were still on the Times’s Silicon Valley beat, it’s a good bet Jobs would have given him the scoop. And at the very least Markoff would have gotten his own version of the story the next day.

Apple’s ‘Obsession With Secrecy’ Isn’t Always Working 

Dan Frommer argues that Apple’s efforts to keep product announcements secret aren’t working:

But it’s hard to argue that Apple is very effective at preventing leaks these days. For instance, there were very few details left for Apple marketing head Phil Schiller to announce during this month’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote.

Take the new iPhone 3GS, which debuted last week. Pretty much everyone knew about its faster speed, better camera, and voice commands weeks ago. Details about the name leaked out days before the event. And thanks to John Gruber’s Daring Fireball, we’d even heard ahead of time that Apple would refresh its MacBook lineup during the event.

But Apple didn’t even try to keep a lot of this stuff secret — the new 3GS hardware features like the video camera and compass, for example, were revealed when they started seeding the OS 3.0 betas. And while yes, I heard the “3GS” name a few weeks in advance, that wasn’t a big deal — it’s just an S. The secrets Apple guards the tightest aren’t the updates to existing products, but the brand-new products. So far so good with the tablet, for example.

Brad Stone’s Big Scoop 

NY Times Silicon Valley beat reporter Brad Stone may not have gotten squat regarding Jobs’s liver transplant, but two years ago he broke the very important news regarding Fake Steve Jobs’s real identity. Keep that in mind.