‘Not Going to Let It Slide’

Jim Dalrymple has assembled a slew of clips from Steve Jobs’s interview at D8 last night. One of many interesting quotes:

When this whole thing with Gizmodo happened, I got advice from people who said ‘you gotta just let it slide, you shouldn’t go after a journalist because they bought stolen property and they tried to extort you.’ And I thought deeply about this, and I ended up concluding that the worst thing that could possibly happen as we get big and we get a little more influence in the world, is if we change our core values and start letting it slide. I can’t do that.

The extortion angle: Gizmodo refused to return the unit to Apple without a written acknowledgement that the device was Apple’s, so that they could publish it, and Brian Lam’s email to Jobs strongly suggested that Gizmodo would do this again if they weren’t granted better access.

What’s the “core value” at play here, though? “Nobody fucks with us”, perhaps.

★ Wednesday, 2 June 2010