Premature obituaries have their uses. It is said that when Alfred Nobel, the Swedish arms dealer, read an obituary that described him as a “merchant of death” he was moved to endow the Nobel Prizes as a way of laundering his image. They also provide opportunities for setting up jokes, as when Mark Twain observed that “the report of my death was an exaggeration,” or when the Daily Telegraph published an obit of folk singer Dave Swarbrick after he’d been admitted to a hospital in the English Midlands with a chest infection.
“It’s not the first time,” Swarbrick said, “that I’ve died in Coventry.”
What are we to make, then, of the obituary of Steve Jobs, Apple’s mercurial CEO, which was inadvertently released by Bloomberg News last week?
It was, of course, hastily withdrawn, but not before copies of it had escaped. Given its subject, it was a tame effort, which is understandable because Bloomberg’s focus is business. Even so, one would have expected it to delve deeper into some of the more intriguing aspects of Jobs’ business career.
The saga of how he recruited John Sculley from Pepsi to run Apple, for example, and was then ousted by Sculley, is a compelling story in itself: a visionary genius bested by a guy who marketed sugared water.
Then there’s the next phase of Jobs’ career. Or, rather, the Next phase, when he founded a computer company of that name. Its machines were lusted after only by geeks but they were beautiful for their time. And they changed the world: Tim Berners-Lee wrote the software for the Web on one. If that were not enough, when Jobs was summoned back to rescue Apple from oblivion, the Next operating system provided the basis for OS X, the system that now powers every Macintosh (and iPhone) sold.
Then there’s the Pixar story, and the Disney sequel, which has effectively made Jobs the dominant shareholder in that company; the iPod story, in which Apple seized control of the online music sector; and the iPhone story in which Apple goes for control of the mobile phone and mobile-internet market. These all receive cursory treatment in the Bloomberg draft.
Bloomberg skirts around Jobs’ personal life, mentioning only that he’s a Buddhist, a vegetarian and is married with four kids. It does, however, mention his brush with pancreatic cancer in 2004, and reveals that he kept it secret for nine months while he “sought alternatives to surgery.” And it makes a passing reference to the questions about Jobs’ health, which surfaced in June after people noticed how gaunt he seemed at Apple’s annual developer conference. But it does not discuss how this was handled by Apple and its CEO, even though it’s a legitimate business story.
The problem is that the stock market perceives Apple as a one-man band, which is why its share price dipped when the health scare broke. Journalists who approached Apple for a comment were told: “Steve’s health is a private matter.”
One of those working on the story was Joe Nocera, of the New York Times. After getting nowhere with Apple’s public relations machine, his phone rang.
“To my amazement,” Nocera reported, “Mr Jobs called me. ‘This is Steve Jobs,’ he began. ‘You think I’m an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he’s above the law, and I think you’re a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong.’ He went on to say that he would give me some details about his recent health problems, but only if I would agree to keep them off the record.”
Nocera was able to reveal, however, that Jobs’ problems were not life threatening and that his cancer had not recurred.
“After he hung up,”’ Nocera said, “it occurred to me that I had just been handed, by Mr Jobs himself, the very information he was refusing to share with the shareholders who have entrusted him with their money. You would think he’d want them to know before me. But apparently not.”
There is an intrinsic conflict between technology firms’ need for “visionary” leadership (which enables the boss to follow his instincts) and shareholders’ need for market-sensitive data. Google has a two-tier shareholding regime to enable its founders to do more or less what they please. Apple doesn’t have such a system, which is why Jobs resorted to the Times.
Perhaps one can guess what music will be played at his funeral, whenever it comes: My Way.
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