WSJ hack: Steve Jobs is a limelight-stealing genius monster who controls an army of ‘Macsturbators’
Thursday, January 11, 2007 - 07:36 PM EST"Unless you were one of the poor reporters who had to yo-yo between Las Vegas and San Francisco this week, you may not have noticed a hidden message in all of the hoopla over the new Apple iPhone," Michael S. Malone writes in a commentray for The Wall Street Journal.
Malone writes, "Apple Computer (make that Apple Inc. now) deliberately counterscheduled its annual MacWorld Expo -- and its important new product announcement -- directly against the Consumer Electronics Show, the world's biggest consumer-electronics convention. Apple was sending a message that not only does it not inhabit the same universe as the rest of the consumer-electronics world (even Microsoft felt obliged to attend CES), but that its announcement would trump anything coming out of Vegas."
MacDailyNews Note: "'We've always had our event in the second week of January, beginning on Monday. They're the ones who changed the date,' said Mike Sponseller, a spokesman for IDG World Expo, operator of Macworld," Dawn Kawamoto reported for CNET News on January 13, 2006. "CES, which usually kicks off around the second weekend in January, had to go with its 2007 dates because of its contract with the convention center in Las Vegas, noted Leah Arnold, a CES spokeswoman." Full article here.
Malone continues, "And it did. The blogosphere lit up the moment Steve Jobs took the stage. On places like Fark.com, the usual fights broke out between the eternally moonstruck Macolytes (more cruelly, 'Macsturbators') and the increasingly jealous Apple-haters. CNN, as is usual with Apple, turned its news coverage into a day-long iPhone flack."
Malone writes, "Mr. Jobs is the most paradoxical of creatures. On the one hand, though time and mortality have mellowed him, he remains something of a monster. If, like me, you grew up in the same neighborhood, went to the same school, interviewed him in the early days of Apple, and even wrote a book about him and his company, there will always be things about him that are unforgivable -- cruelties and manipulations (especially to Steve Wozniak), early crimes (illegal telephones, ironically), megalomania, and an unquenchable need to take credit from others (Do you know who led the original Mac team? Invented the iPod? Devised the new iPhone? I didn't think so) -- and that no achievement will ever erase."
MacDailyNews Take: Oh great, a Wall Street Journal commentator with an axe to grind.
Malone writes, "Yet there is no denying that Mr. Jobs is a business genius, the greatest marketer of our time, the most charismatic figure in electronics history. And he is the only really interesting person left in high tech, once the liveliest, most maverick corner of the industrial world. Sometimes, he seems like the only guy left in tech who's having fun. Of course, there are also the products themselves. The iMac, the iPod and the new iPhone are, whatever the flaws, masterpieces of industrial design and enlightened human interfacing. They make competitors' products -- even when they're better machines -- seem plodding and prosaic. So even if Mr. Jobs shamelessly steals the limelight from his subordinates, we have seen, and hope never to see again, what Apple looks like without him."
Malone writes, "This week, Mr. Jobs showed just what he can do when he's in good health and sitting on a cool new product. There were great products at the CES, but after Tuesday no one noticed. The iPhone, which won't be shipped until June, suffers from a number of classic Apple-under-Jobs weaknesses: not enough memory, probably not enough battery, a comparatively large (though wonderfully thin) case, a touch screen that will infuriate cell phone users and scratch up like the early iPods, and an unpopular distribution partner (Cingular). And the iPhone is stunningly expensive ($500 plus a two-year Cingular commitment)."
Malone writes, "But who cares? As Mr. Jobs said, the iPhone is going to revolutionize the phone. Not because it offers anything fundamentally new, but because it brilliantly ties together nearly all of the currently disparate portable consumer tech functions into a single exquisite package driven by a powerful and intuitive interface. But that's only part of it. The iPhone will transform the market because unlike other tech mavericks who try to push the envelope, Mr. Jobs can introduce the iPhone, even in a clumsy, overpriced 1.0 version, and trust that the army of several million Apple true believers will rush out and buy."
"For all his demons, thank God for him in this age of cookie-cutter CEOs. For a decade now (and for another decade at the beginning of the PC age) he has run the most enthralling and rewarding show in high tech. Let's hope he gives us at least one decade more," Malone writes
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Whoops, scratch "Wall Street Journal commentator" stuff and make it "royal asshole with an axe to grind who writes schizo commentaries for which the normally-sane Wall Street Journal actually pays him and then, incredibly, publishes." Note that Malone praises sporadically in order to grant himself license to demean with what he thinks is impunity. We moonstruck Macsturbators hereby revoke your license, Mr. Malone.
We won't even bother asking why he describes the iPhone as "clumsy," how he knows all about iPhone touchscreens, batteries, and memory without ever touching one, or why he can't understand that people, sorry "Macsturbators," buy Apple Macs and other Apple products simply because they are markedly better than the alternatives.
Only God knows what he thinks Steve Jobs did to him that caused such obvious and deep-seated emotional scars.
We can only surmise that Malone wants this cruel monstrous Jobs creature to continue manipulating his army of eternally moonstruck Macolytes for as long as possible, so he can continue working on his pathological hatred issues in public by staining the pages of The Wall Street Journal with his festering bullshit.
Let's Google a bit, shall we? Here are some quotes by master prognosticator Michael S. Malone from his article "Apple R.I.P." published by Forbes on October 5, 2000:
• Steve Jobs can't run companies... Why is he a poor CEO? Because he's mercurial, insufficiently engaged by the more boring (but crucial) operations like distribution and, ultimately, because he's a pretty nasty piece of work.
• Apple is a small fish, and the pond is going dry... Now that Apple has upgraded its customer base it has no place to go. And to make matters worse, the rise of personal digital assistants, palmtops, embedded controllers, etc. promises in the next few years to render the PC industry into a backwater business filled with commodity products--hardly the place to be a pricey innovator.
• Cool people, Apple's market, are already bored with the iMac. Thus, Jobs created an insatiable hunger for novelty that now even Apple, even with its splendid new cube, can't satiate. In the process, he hastened the entire personal computer industry towards its end... having hastened the end of the desktop PC era, Steve Jobs has put Apple again in a precarious position. When the end does come, the big companies will have the necessary capital to transition into the multitude of new industries that will evolve out of the PC. The products of these new markets will be, thanks to Apple, stylish and beautiful. What an irony it will be if Apple, cranking out ever-less profitable commodity iMacs, its stock depressed, cannot afford to follow.
Malone's crystal ball is as cracked as his head.
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"Macsturbators"
That's about as original as Smackintush and Crapple. So many idiots, so little Polonium.