Steve Jobs at Apple Employee Q & A: Google's Evil Tagline "Bullshit" and Flash is "Lazy"
Wired's Epicenter blog posted last night on an employees only post-iPad conference at Apple HQ with Steve Jobs, where the iJefe got feisty on matters regarding Google's iPhone battle, and the failings of Adobe. In other words: REAL TALK.
What I want to know is: Which Apple employee hasn't drank enough Kool-Aid/has the balls to stand up in a room with Jobs, and grill him about Google and Flash? Either way, they got the answers. But how do they stand up on the REALTALK-o-Meter? Graded on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being Sign Language, 10 being REAL TALK.
On Google: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won't let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there's no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don't be evil mantra: "It's bullshit." Audience roars.
Emphasis mine, though Wired later clears up that Jobs may have said "crap," instead of "bullshit."
REAL TALK-o-Meter: 6 if he said "crap," 7 if he said "bullshit," somewhere in Whitney "Hell to the No" Houston territory. Because any companies in the business of technology telling people they're out to make the World a Better Place are basically full of it, which obviously includes Apple. In fact, aren't most passive-defensive declarative statements bullshit? When someone says "I can't stand stupid people," it's like, why would you say that? Are you insecure about being stupid? How is everyone else stupid? Etc.
About Adobe: They are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don't do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it's because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5.
REAL TALK-o-Meter: A low 3. Yes, he was talking about the Decision Makers of Adobe, but writing an entire company off as "lazy" to your own employees is pretty disingenuous. Is Adobe really not up to speed because their guys are sitting around on beanbag chairs all day, smoking weed and playing Dolphin Olympics on their laptops? No. And is the reason the iPad and iPhone don't support Flash because it's buggy? Might have been taken into consideration, but to speak to it as the primary reason Apple's are crashing at least sounds misleading. So many of the websites you visit every day utilize flash. Why can't Apple's products—among other things—crash less, even if Flash is buggy? Then again, it's Jobs' decision to use Flash or not, REAL TALK. As for HTML5, if by "the world" Jobs means "Apple and whoever follows," he's correct. Which he probably does mean, because he's a computer nerd who's trying to run the universe.
Other notable notes that Wired picked up in the MacRumors forum:
- Apple will deliver aggressive updates to iPhone that Android/Google won't be able to keep up with
- iPad is up there with the iPhone and Mac as the most important products Jobs has been a part of
- Regarding the Lala acquisition, Apple was interested in bringing those people into the iTunes team
- Next iPhone coming is an A+ update
- New Macs for 2010 are going to take Apple to the next level
- Blu-Ray software is a mess, and Apple will wait until sales really start to take off before implementing it.
So, in this grading of the REAL TALK-O-Meter, Steve Jobs gets a 4.25 average, for which he gets nothing. At 8, we'll send him a Golden Shirt Microphone. Any employees who dare question Jobs and still have their testicles fully intact get figureative salutes from people all over who are too afraid to stand up to their power-crazy nerd bosses, and any tipsters who have anything else to say about how REAL the REAL TALK of Steve Jobs is (or the employees who questioned him, for that matter) gets an email address to say it to.
Oh, and as a reminder: this is what REAL TALK looks like.