Descending Into a Nation of Bloggers: How Steve's Right

Steve Jobs, unfiltered, seems to be the most attractive interview in the tech world, bar none. That's why his opening up at AllThingsD last night continues to make waves in the tech news world, as his every word is dissected, repeated and spun. The extremely quotable Jobs dropped a number of interesting insights and remarkable candidness for the leader of the technology industry's largest company, and arguably one of the most successful, with legions of loyal customers, and a similar number of would-be competitors. One of his most remarkable quotes regarded the challenge of supporting high quality content, and an editorial press, contrasted with what he saw as a descent into a "nation of bloggers".

Rather than react in an emotional way, pounding out paragraphs to pooh-pooh Jobs' dismissiveness of an entire craft - of which I am obviously part - one has to understand his perspective, and how Apple is impacted by the world of blogs, to see how he could come to his conclusions.

In a world when many many businesses are becoming more open, sharing short updates on Twitter, single paragraph announcements and events on Facebook, and regular posts from thought leaders and executives through blogging, Apple seems to be on the outside looking in. They are notable for their continued closed approach, one built on secrets and surprise. Of late, Steve Jobs has opened up a bit, acting as a one man social media machine with e-mails to customers and bloggers, and penning longer notes on the Apple.com Web site, like that on Flash from last month. But Apple not only doesn't really need to participate in this world, but honestly has not seen much benefit from the army of Mac bloggers. It's no surprise that Steve has the opinions he does about bloggers, and the company needs them less than many others do.

The funny thing about Steve Jobs is he's been doing this for a long time. He was on the cover of Time and Fortune, BusinessWeek and Newsweek decades before the first blogs. His return to Apple in 1997 came as the Internet was ascending, but the term blogging was practically unknown. This was two years before Ev Williams and team started their blogging software at Pyra Labs, and two years before Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal. In his time at Apple, Steve Jobs and his team has never really suffered for a lack of news. The mainstream media, from the aforementioned press to the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and others, have been available to review the company's products, to report on their news, and to dissect the company's typically rosy financial results.

Meanwhile, for the most part, Apple and Mac coverage on blogs can be divided into three camps - Apple fans, Apple haters and Apple rumor seekers.

Those who love the company and its products are almost mythical in their obsessions and loyalty. Those who hate Apple are similarly entrenched, if not always as vocal. And those who are constantly seeking to undermine Steve and Apple's launch schedule and product roadmap have expanded from a once-niche industry to something much more mainstream. And in many cases, Apple has had to take aim against blogs to protect their positions.

Apple's conflicts with bloggers have been well documented. Apple sued anonymous posters on AppleInsider for leaking product photos, including the G4 Cube, before their time. Apple sued the then anonymous author of Think Secret, for discussion of an unlaunched product, called "Asteroid", a new audio interface for GarageBand users. And of course, most recently, Gawker Media paid to gain access to a prototype next generation iPhone which may or may not have been stolen. And yes, Apple is going after those guys too. (This doesn't even go into his latest e-mail trading with Ryan Tate at Valleywag, a coworker of mine from a decade-plus ago.)

As far as Apple is concerned, in contrast to what they see as professional and respectable coverage of their products in the still much read mainstream media, the bloggers have really been nothing but trouble, with the drawbacks and amateur approach outweighing any potential benefits from consistent fandom selwehere. The Macintosh rumors industry, which I have largely ignored of late, is in constant flow, since Mac OS Rumors kicked it off in the mid nineties, and it's no wonder why Apple has taken this approach to not trust the industry as a whole.

Can one separate the term "blogger" from one who blogs, and not feel like Apple and Steve Jobs are slamming an entire informal industry? Of course. There are absolutely some very well written, professional, editorially focused blog networks out there. There are a lot of individual bloggers who do a great job expressing their thoughts on Apple and many other companies. But for one of the world's best Marketers, blogs are little help at all. Of course Steve Jobs wouldn't want the nation to "descend" into one full of "bloggers" who target his company with falsehoods and borderline criminal activity. Of course he would like to control the message and keep the element of surprise.

Steve's comments don't mean that Apple wants sites like The Unofficial Apple Weblog and The Apple Blog to go away, but Steve is calling for decorum that he just isn't exposed to. Steve Jobs and Apple don't need bloggers. They have operated above the fray, and are calling for something better than what they have seen - something that delivers them value.

Do You Really Care About the iPhone 4? I Don't.

Amidst all the debate around Gizmodo's revelations around Apple's next generation iPhone and the methods by which they obtained access to the device, little was said about whether the device itself warranted the attention that was received. It seemed more people were excited in the idea of a scoop, and the fact that Apple probably didn't want us to be seeing the iPhone before it was ready to ship, than they were about the features themselves.

In addition, the debate around what is next for the iPhone is as much about the potential to gain new carrier relationships than anything that can be developed on the hardware side. What has happened, in a few short years since the phone's 2007 debut, is that the iPhone has become a mature device - one that isn't going to dramatically take our breath away and demand an instant upgrade with each iteration. Even as an iPhone owner who may consider upgrading when the time comes, there is no breathlessness around said scoopage, and I won't seriously be interested in the device unless it's available for sale.

One of the big benefits of Apple's resurgence is that the company's products are commonplace and pervasive. While it doesn't seem all that long ago that one had to go out of their way to buy a Macintosh or find fellow Mac users, the iPhone platform is seen as the market leader, and has gained its own fair share of challengers looking to chip away at its feature lead and customer share. Android, led by Google's focused efforts and those of its partners is gaining share, and the functionality differentiation between the two devices is decreasing.

While one should not assume that Apple is standing still, and they clearly demonstrated their intent to extend their lead with the April introductions of iPhone OS 4, the iPhone hardware and functionality itself has reached the maturity level once seen with the company's iPod line. With each iteration, we knew we could expect a smaller form factor, improved menu items, and more hard disk space. With the iPhone, we can again expect an improved form factor, potential speed improvements and more hard disk space. That brings the window of speculation to the origin of the CPU and the potential for a front-facing camera.

Hold me back.

For the most part, Apple has shaken off its position of challenger, and its product lines have become rather predictable. Just as we don't get too excited about incremental megahertz upgrades on the company's laptop and desktop lines, or wait in line overnight for monitors that have improved pixel counts or screen margins, the iPhone line has achieved a position where whatever is best now is great and whatever is better tomorrow will be just fine too.

At the end of 2009, I said you would have to be insane to buy a new iPhone now because of three things: 1) AT&T, 2) Android and 3) Apple. I still believe AT&T is a major roadblock in anybody getting excited about the current, or next generation, iPhones. I believe we have seen Android is a serious challenger and one to be considered, especially if you are not married to the iTunes store. And now, we have a better idea as to the schedule of the next device, which will probably arrive at the end of the summer.

In the five months since that post, the roadmap and phone family from Android has become a lot more clear. If you like the Nexus One, it is available, as are the latest updates to the Droid. If you are an Android fan, that platform is seeing more innovation today, updating more quickly and with more options. If you are an iPhone fan, you probably have seen enough from Android to make a good decision as to what's next for you. If you think AT&T is the devil, you haven't gotten enough data to say whether you will have an alternative from Apple and any amount of cameras, or lacking screws, or flash memory on the next iPhone isn't going to change your mind.

Last year, I told you I learned to stop chasing Apple rumors. Not only are most of them not true, but the ones that are true are typically mundane. You want a great rumor? Find out what the next iPads look like, as that platform will change pretty quickly. Discover a new product line that hasn't yet been introduced. Find out if Apple will ever get serious about the Apple TV. But the lure of the next generation iPhone isn't even enough to make us blink any more. We know they update on a pretty regular cycle and they'll just make it strong enough to make it appealing.

We Apple Fans Are In Mac Tablet Rumors Reruns

Although this year seems to be the real deal, the hype around Apple's Mac Tablet being set for imminent debut is "same old same old" to us jaded Cupertino fans who have been watching the company closely for the last decade-plus. While the January 26th date for a presentation no doubt involving Steve Jobs finally moves this long-broiling rumor toward the line for reality, hardly a year has gone buy since the beginning of the last decade when it wasn't expected that Apple would finally get a Web tablet out the door and onto shelves and desks everywhere.

Much of the background for the initial hype around the long-rumored Mac tablet came from Steve Jobs' cancellation of the Newton PDA line upon his return to Apple, with hints that the company would eventually return to the market. Rumors about Apple handhelds on the Cupertino campus were rampant, even as the Palm Pilot took the world by storm, and Handspring came and went. While subsequent stories have quoted CEO Steve Jobs saying he was just as proud of the products they had chosen not to ship as those they did, rumors for a handheld never quite went away, and they eventually morphed into often wild speculation around the tablet - the one that might finally be released in a few weeks.

Did you know these rumors have been going on for a full decade? If you are a Mac rumor afficionado like I am, you would. Observe:

"And just to keep true to those old 'Apple-developing-a-PDA' and 'Apple developing a Mac tablet' rumours, the iWalk contains full PDA functionality."

Apple's ‘breakthrough’ – iPod or iWalk?
The Register, October 23, 2001

Remarkable, even to my jaded eyes, was the fact that the latest name du jour, the iSlate, was suggested as far back as 2002...

"May we speculate that the big item due to set the Macintosh welkin ringing ... next month just might be an Apple tablet computer. Think of a name: iSlate, iNote, iPad (maybe too close to iPod)."

-- Garry Barker, Livewire, December 4, 2002

And when MacWorld San Francisco 2003 didn't see the Tablet debut, rumors continued, saying we even knew factories that were hard at work making plastics. Sound familiar?

Mobile Mac slate device to launch?

"All we know about this piece of plastic is that:
1) it is vouched for by a "previously good source" who has contacts in the factory where it's being made
2) it is almost an inch thick, at 24.6mm; and its other dimensions are 188mm by 132mm
3) the factory where it is being assembled is supposedly under contract to Apple."

-- MacWhispers, March 29, 2003

By the end of 2003, from his pulpit, Robert Cringely said that within the year, Apple would finally deliver a tablet, one powered by Intel, instead of the PowerPC chips at the time running the entire Macintosh line. So yes, a 2004 debut was expected!

"A year from now, I am sure these technical problems will be solved, but by then Motorola will have been shipping DS-CDMA products for 12 months. And some of those products will be going in that Apple tablet computer. Watch TV in your bathroom, access your audio and video collection from anywhere in the house, control your big screen TV and route video to it from your desktop or the Internet. "

Apple's Tablet Computer Might Finally Be That Link Between Your PC and TV
-- Robert Cringely, November 27, 2003

But it didn't come in 2004! A shame! What about 2005 then? And what if it ran full Mac OS X or a derivative, often discussed as Mac OS X Lite?

"Speculation over what Jobs might reveal this year are all over the map ... (including) an Intel-powered Mac Tablet running Mac OS X or a "Mac OS X Lite.""

-- MacDailyNews, May 27, 2005

It didn't happen that year either. A shame! Again! Good thing that the following year, 2006, saw companies in Taiwan working on costs for this product, to be launched in mid 2007. Sound familiar, again?

"Apple researchers have built a full working prototype of a Mac tablet PC and three Companies in Taiwan are now costing a product for a potential launch in mid 2007..."

-- Smarthouse, via MacDailyNews, November 26, 2006

So here we are at the beginning of the new year, 2010, and once again, the Mac faithful, and now the many, many media followers who have piled on to original core of Mac rumormongers, are ready for the Tablet, again. This time, it seems real. Rather than jump in and tell you what I think it is, or whether I think it will be a good fit for my home, I have learned to sit back and trust Steve and his team. They were right about the iPod. They were right about the iTunes Store. They were right about Mac OS X and they were hugely right about the iPhone. Like I said yesterday, in my article on 2010 computing, the entire industry is waiting to see if Apple really is going to make a tablet this time, and what that means for everyone.

But forgive my jaded elder ears if I am not piling on the Tablet bandwagon and arguing who is right and who is wrong. The hubbub isn't that we are bored and out of shiny objects to discuss, what with Android and all matter of iPhone apps. The issue is not that we don't need the tablet, or that some people don't want to be told what to speculate about, but that I know we don't know, just like we didn't know in 2002 or 2003 or 2004 or 2005 or 2006 or 2007.

I hope 2010 is the year that this debuts, if for nothing else that we Mac fans can find something else to speculate about.

How I Learned to Stop Chasing and Caring About Apple Rumors

In college, during a time when Apple's potential demise ran from probable to "extremely likely", my obsession around the Mac was all-consuming. In the early days for customizable Web browsers, my entire browser bar was littered with Macintosh-related bookmarks, from MacCentral and Macintouch to MacWeek, Apple Recon, Apple Insider, ThinkSecret, As the Apple Turns and the big kahuna, MacSurfer, which had practically every Apple-related update from the day's news known to man. Add on to that my constantly participating on Apple stock related chat boards, from Yahoo! Finance to Raging Bull and Investors Hub, to the ultimate in insider Applery, a real-time chat room for discussing Apple stock, called AAPL Talk, and you could see that Cupertino was a major hub of my daily universe.

As I made it my personal mission to help convert PC users to the Mac, and debated the benefits of OpenDoc and CyberDog, constantly reloading VersionTracker to get the up to the minute updates to Mac software, I also was an occasional participant in the darker underworld of Mac rumors, reading the anonymous bulletin boards across the Web which often featured unreleased specs of yet to be issued products, sometimes full quarters in advance. Sometimes they were wrong, but very often they were right. MacWorld Expos would be anticipated, and then arrive, as we saw exactly what we had already predicted on display, and remained decidedly underwhelmed with everything else - unhelpfully dubbing each the weakest MacWorld to date.


Two Rumors that Never Came Close to Making It
The froth around what Apple would or would not do was so palpable that fans would breathlessly demand Cupertino release products that fulfilled their every wish - fantastical items that would never see the light of day. Strawberry iBooks. A Mac Palm Pilot to replace the Newton. An Apple Tablet. The G6. Apple-branded projectors. It all got to be pretty silly - as "sources" often turned out to be any teenage kid with access to Photoshop or a handheld that made blurry video.

Over time, a few things happened. First, most of Apple's updates stopped having relevance for me. I'm not updating my computer all that often, so the month by month specifications race meant very little, and not being a movie or graphics pro, anything in that realm was a waste for me. Second, our small community of rumormongers started to blur in with the rest of the tech media, themselves eager to get a sniff of Steve Jobs' plans days ahead of their unveiling. Third, Apple started to succeed and become one of the more trusted, if not stable, companies, making my mission a much less important one. Now, practically anyone can see the benefits of the platform over the alternative, even as we move more of our activity to the Web, making some of the issues moot.

Harry McCracken of Technologizer recently had a solid post discussing how Apple's long history of acquisition rumors are almost entirely without truth. So too are the many finger to the wind prognostications from those would-be tech journalists and bloggers eager to get a scoop. Apple has done a fantastic job, in most cases, of locking down the rumor flow from the sieve of the old days. That there will be an eventual update to the iPhone is no secret. That the newest Mac Mini had one extra USB port was hardly news. I've even committed something resembling heresy - I've stopped watching the video taped updates from WWDC and other Special Events. Considering the first blog post I ever made on louisgray.com was in anticipation of MacWorld Expo in January of 2006, you can see things have changed.

The net change over the last few years is this: First, there are fewer leaks and news items sneaking out of Cupertino. Second, there are more people looking for them than ever. As a result, there is a ton of noise, and most of it is completely useless. So I've turned off the noise. I don't go to these sites, and I skip over most Apple rumor news when it hits my RSS reader, because it's devoid of truth, largely guesses, fumes and hyperbole. I just wish some of you could have experienced some of the very real excitement and glee the rest of us dedicated fans felt back in the late 90s when we scored early graphics of the next iMac, or heard about the iPod the day before Steve showed it to the world, before the Mac went mainstream, and those of us who were "the crazy ones" started to look normal to the rest of the world.

Does Your Ethical Stance on Rumors Change in a Down Economy?

By Cyndy Aleo-Carreira of Shakespeare I Ain't (E-mail / Twitter)

Tech blogging is just as competitive, if not more competitive, than mainstream news. Nearly every blogger salivates over the tiniest little rumor that could turn into the scoop that lands you the top spot on Techmeme or the front page of Slashdot or Digg. It's practically become acceptable to run with the unconfirmed rumor in order to make it out of the gate first.

Should that codicil to a blogger's code of ethics be removed in a down economy?

Two notable stories have "broken" so far this year that lack confirmation. The first, making its appearance on Gizmodo this past Monday, had Steve Jobs passing on the Macworld keynote because he's allegedly on his deathbed. The second, also breaking on Monday, had SD Times claiming Google would put Juniper out of business by coming out with a hush-hush router to end all routers.

Apple still had a new 17" MacBook Pro and some sexy software upgrades, but Juniper didn't fare so well, dropping steadily throughout the week with a huge dip this morning as the story about the stock falling and the alleged Google router hit the mainstream press.

Are either of these stories true? Looking at past history and the companies involved, I think it's pretty safe to say that Steve Jobs is sick. That's been apparent since the rumors of his imminent demise started swirling after his appearance last year. However, Steve Jobs is not stupid. I don't think he would let things get to the point where he's on his death bed before taking some steps to turn over control of the company, and speculating that he's got one foot on a banana peel over a grave is gossip, not news.

As for Google and Juniper, it's no big secret that Google wants things Google's way. Is Google going to go into the hardware business and compete against companies like Cisco? Never. It's simply not going to happen. If they weren't willing to do it for a consumer device like the rumored Gphone we were all salivating over the idea of years back, they certainly aren't going to do it on a scale like routers, where failure would be catastrophic. But they have Android, and they've shown a desire to apply their software acumen to existing hardware issues. Is it conceivable they are planning to (or already are) working with a hardware company, much as they did with HTC on Android? I might bet a few pretzel sticks on that.

Based on the evidence, however, Google isn't going to topple Juniper, and we aren't going to see Cupertino shrouded in black crepe any time in the near future. And in a climate where tech jobs are on the chopping block and companies are scampering to drive their stock back up to appease shareholders, going for the big dramatic story rather that looking at the facts is going to end up with all of us out of work. If the tech companies go under, so do the jobs writing about them.

Read more by Cyndy Aleo-Carreira at Shakespeare I Ain't.