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The day Steve Jobs dissed me hard
- wccrawford 16y agoA good lesson about dealing with corporate giants.
- sivers 16y agoYeah. Made me wary to tie any future business too closely to any one big company. Also see http://sivers.org/big-vs-little-clients http://sivers.org/big-vs-little-clients
- wheels 16y agoSimilar: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/09/16/most-startups-should-be-deer-hunters/ http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/09/16/most-startups-...
- netcan 16y agoReading this I realized how scary Apple's reputation is, like you should expect them to do spiteful things. I hear invited to be pitched by Steve, pissed off their legal department, no answer... I would be wetting myself. Reading this in 2003 probably wouldn't have had quite this effect.
- angusgr 16y agoReading this in 2003 It looks like it was published just now, so the author is looking at it in hindsight, knowing Apple's current reputation. (I still agree with your comment, just thought that warranted consideration.)
- sivers 16y agoIt was scarier then, because it affected my business deeply, then. Now it doesn't affect me at all - it's just an old tale I can tell, that someone might find entertaining or helpful.
- netcan 16y agoWas it scary because it was Apple or because it was a big company that you had no influence over?
- sivers 16y agoAny big company. Anyone who I had promised my clients I could deliver them to, then changed their mind. Really more my fault than Apple's, for promising something to my clients before I had a signed contract in my hand. But the way they made it sound at that initial meeting, with the full pitch, immediate contract, and short timeline, made it sound like the contract was a small technicality. Lesson learned, as usual. ;-)
- nlogn 16y agoI think you are far too forgiving. Jobs' language initially indicated Apple wanted all music in the store. Later he reversed his position entirely and seemingly spitefully. Apple does great things, but Jobs does have a reputation for expecting loyalty from companies they do business with. I suspect we'll see more moves from Apple like blocking Adobe's Flash to iPhone app tool (at least until presumably the FTC pressured them). That and a bunch of other great products.
- angusgr 16y agoRight, sorry. I didn't mean to imply that you'd decided to jump on some kind of "Steve Jobs is evil" bandwagon. The story seems balanced, probably more balanced than it would have been if you'd written it back in 2003 (I'd wager.)
- 1337p337 16y agoIt reminds me of their sudden decision to drop their XServe line, with no explanation or hint of follow-up. We have a guy that has specialized in "enterprise-y" Apple deployments. We have a few XServes here and the default laptop people get is a MacBook. Essentially, years of building domain expertise on this platform have been wiped from his resume, and he's now terrified for his career; he's decided to learn a certain open-source programming language, one which is fairly friendly to Macs and good for scripting (so he can learn while having a practical use, since he's done a lot of bash scripting) as well as enjoying some popularity for web application development. He wants to hedge if Apple doesn't create an analogous replacement. Jobs is capricious and doesn't tip his hand; the article's lesson of not basing anything on his (or any other person's or company's) whims is a pretty good one.
- radioactive21 16y agoIt's Steve Jobs. He once went to a town hall meeting, just to tell them Apple has been in the city for so and so years, and how he's expanding the HQ and how things were going. That's all he wanted to say, nothing to complain about, but just reminding them who Apple is.
- radicaldreamer 16y agoHe obviously wanted some tax breaks for Apple for staying in Cupertino.
- gwern 16y ago> Reading this in 2003 probably wouldn't have had quite this effect. I think this is an example of the Jobs reality distortion field. Geeks, at least, did distrust Apple back in ~2000. Consider high geek Neal Stephenson's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Command_Line http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Com... essay written back in the dark ages of 1999 : > "It is a bit unsettling, at first, to think of Apple as a control freak, because it is completely at odds with their corporate image. Weren't these the guys who aired the famous Super Bowl ads showing suited, blindfolded executives marching like lemmings off a cliff? Isn't this the company that even now runs ads picturing the Dalai Lama (except in Hong Kong) and Einstein and other offbeat rebels? > It is indeed the same company, and the fact that they have been able to plant this image of themselves as creative and rebellious free-thinkers in the minds of so many intelligent and media-hardened skeptics really gives one pause. It is testimony to the insidious power of expensive slick ad campaigns and, perhaps, to a certain amount of wishful thinking in the minds of people who fall for them."
- jamn 16y agoPlaying the devil's advocate here. I have bought more than a couple of CDs from CD Baby and thanks to them I've been able to connect with more than a couple of wonderful artists. However, from Apple's perspective, it must have seemed like CD Baby was simply trying to make a profit simply by guaranteeing access to the Apple Store, and therefore Apple decided not to move forward in order to protect its brand.
- Lazlo_Nibble 16y agoExcept that Apple didn't decide not to move forward -- Sivers assumed that Apple had decided not to move forward, based on an offhand reference by Jobs in a keynote.
- sivers 16y agoExactly. I think most of this timing was circumstance, not causal. Maybe they were just busy dealing with the bigger labels first, and put a positive public spin on their delay. I was hanging on his every word, since we were hearing nothing else from them. So his keynote seemed to be a decision. Instead, it was just an important lesson on spin and circumstance.
- adrianbye 16y agoi disagree. i think because you walked away in a classy way you demonstrated power and that brought them back to the table.
- mcantor 16y agoThe whole fiasco could have been avoided if someone had simply gotten back to you, though.
- josefresco 16y agoAmazing how a company with 500K tracks wasn't assigned a rep inside Apple. Has this changed?
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- dshep 16y agoWow. Really interesting to see Steve spin the smaller music collection of iTunes as a positive. I think this is going to make me consider his words more closely in the future.
- DrStalker 16y agoThen the iPad was delayed in Australia they announced it as a positive thing; the product was so popular they were diverting the stock meant for Australia to the US, and wasn't it great news for Australia that we were going to get such an awesome product! Apple's ability to spin is amazing, but not as amazing as the number of people eating up every word of it without thinking about what they are hearing.
- alttab 16y agoAnd yet, people still wait in line full knowing Jobs has a reputation for being an ass sometimes. A rich, rich ass.
- chunkbot 16y agoMy personal favorite: Steve Jobs Says 7-Inch Tablets Are ‘Dead on Arrival’... Apparently, these devices are too small for a pleasant touchscreen experience. I typed this from my 3.5 inch iPhone.
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- redthrowaway 16y ago"I asked again, saying we had over 100,000 albums, already ripped as lossless WAV files, with all of the info carefully entered by the artist themselves, ready to send to their servers with their exact specifications. They said sorry - you need to use this software - there is no other way. Ugh. That means we have to pull each one of those CDs off of the shelf again, stick it in a Mac, then cut-and-paste every song title into that Mac software. But so be it. If that's what Apple needs, OK." It would take about a day for a competent programmer to figure out how to automate this process.
- sivers 16y agoWe had already automated it. But Apple was insisting we not use our own software or ripped files. That they had to come directly from the master audio CD.
- rottencupcakes 16y agoI think you're misreading him. If you really had lossless wavs and data, you could have emulated a 'CD' and had the apple software rip it, then put in the tags. Probably would have saved thousands of man hours compared to putting physical CDs in the drives.
- sivers 16y agoOh well. :-) All turned out wonderful in the end. We never needed to re-rip the CDs after all. Apple took bulk-uploads the same as all the other companies. An incredibly efficient way of delivering over 2 million songs+metadata from one company to another. A nice little collection of Ruby & PHP scripts on a stack of Linux servers & Windows encoding boxes did everything. Unfortunately I'm not allowed to open-source that software since I sold it.
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago>Apple took bulk-uploads the same as all the other companies. Wouldn't it have been cheaper and quicker to send a few hard drives with the data on by post?
- danielnicollet 16y agoThis posts proves something that I feel many seem to forget at times. Despite great products, Apple is human after all.
- tiagok 16y agocongrats, really, you had an amzing spirit of humility! my admiration goes to you!
- blr_hack 16y agoSteve jobs may be a much greater innovator. But surely, can learn a thing or two, on integrity, from Derek Sivers. Also this is a lesson in on how to have only loosely-coupled relations/dependencies with other companies (particularly, if they are big). When need to go for tightly-coupled ones dependencies, expect it to break, and have a back-up plan.
- angryasian 16y agoI really don't understand everyone's reverence for Steve Jobs, but to me this shows how evil and manipulative he is ( not the first time hearing this about him). What people call timing, I call intentional to openly put it out there they want these independents, have others follow their lead and open their stores to independent artists, and then openly and publicly call every other service out there a joke because they let anyone on. Then the next day signing the contract. I highly doubt its all just coincidental.
- lisper 16y ago> I really don't understand everyone's reverence for Steve Jobs This should help clarify it: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ta?s=AAPL+Basic+Tech.+Analysis&t=5y http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ta?s=AAPL+Basic+Tech.+Analysis...
- antidaily 16y ago"They edit!" Classic.
- mirkules 16y ago"Whatever. Fucking Apple. We started encoding and uploading immediately." What really struck me about this post is that he went back to Apple after being disrespected so hard. The lesson is there are times when you have to swallow a big lump of pride in order to better your business. I know I would have a hard time doing that.
- seunosewa 16y agoFunny how by doing that you're reinforcing the other party's arrogance.
- yardie 16y agoI'm sure there are hundreds if not thousands of developers that could say the same of Microsoft. Its probably the same for Walmart suppliers.
- pixelbath 16y agoWhat struck me is that he was under no obligation to do so at that point, having already refunded his users, but did it anyway. Thanks for helping out the indies, sivers.
- brisance 16y agoThis is similar in a sense to how Adobe mishandled their "Flash on iOS" play, right from the start. They took it for granted that Apple would allow Flash-developed apps on the App Store.
- bl4k 16y agoLesson: pick unique price points so that you know when you are being dissed
- tunaslut 16y agooh man, I saw this too early in the morning and read it as "The day Steve Jobs kissed me hard" :)
- guelo 16y agoAll big companies spin and backtrack and screw people over, but what I think sets apple apart is their lack of communications. If you're going to screw me over please go ahead and tell me, preferably with a little notice. Don't make me stew in my stress flying my business blind. It is a lack of respect.
- rdmlx 16y agoGood on you for refunding the $200,000.
- jfb 16y agoI'm no going to defend Apple here, really, but rather to point out that Apple tends to understaff, and what may read as malignancy from the outside can often be more charitably explained by too few people working too many hours.
- kenjackson 16y agoActually there's another guy from Apple on HN who is very clear that employees at Apple get all their core work done in 40 hours. They work extra hours to go above and beyond. At least that's what he says...
- jfb 16y agoThat was not my experience. I'll leave it at that.
- DanielN 16y ago"Maybe you can't appreciate this now, but the summer of 2003 was the biggest turning point that independent music has ever had." This has always struck me as interesting point from a music fan's perspective. It seems like the confluence of a lot of factor's led to expansion of independent music around this time. 2001, 2002 was around when cable and DSL prices started to drop outside of major cities. The opening of Itunes. And seemingly a lot of big time independent artists began to jump to major labels (or made major releases from smaller labels) and released very successful albums. Death Cab for Cutie, The Shines, and Modest Mouse off the top of my head. Just an interesting phenomena I've always been curious about. This article was eye opening as to what one of the key forces in this move might have been.