Friday, January 29, 2010

Letter to Steve Jobs

Dear Mister Jobs,

I have recently been exposed to the video of you releasing your latest product, the iPad, and I thought that you did not look too enthusiastic about it. Of course I am not too impressed by it myself, even though I am a happy iPhone owner from the day it was released in Canada. It is a truly remarquable product this iPhone 3G. The only Apple product I own by the way and so far the only one I intend to own. But I digress; this letter is about your Keynote and the iPad.

I can’t help but remember, was it you or your PR team saying that: NO TABLET WAS ON THE APPLE ROADMAP. And of course, that was true, it should have stayed that way and you know it. It seems that the only people not getting the message is actually those to whom it was intended: The press and the average geek who built up this whole expectation. And that ended up with your organization punishing the world with the iPad. All that it required was a couple of months of R&D anyway.

For the iPad to actually be great I would have needed a better, more complete, operating system than the iPhone OS but then, you would have sold it 800$ or even 1000$, maybe more. Then you would have competed with your own product line, namely the MacBook’s. This would have been a commercial blunder. Cheaper than the 500$ it will sell for in a few months probably would have been just as stupid. You had all the reasons in the world not to want to market such a thing and a clear message had to be sent to the press and the consumers: “Shut up and stop trying to tell ME (us, you … well Apple and Steve Jobs… whatever pronoun was needed here) what we should do next!”

But you are not without faults in this mess. The culture of secrecy at Apple always was about building hype and expectations… and then, there is Adobe whom Apple was an accomplice that helped them to grow into the monster who owns the same FLASH technology that hurts the iPad because of its Lack of support. Such Irony that you would call it the most greatest of the awesome way to surf the Web (a WHOLE web page at once!) when it can’t render roughly the third of those web pages as intended because they include Flash. I think not many of us saw the irony.

Another beauty is how you managed NOT to squeeze a webcam in there! How did the board of directors let you get away with that? How stupid can they be? I fully understand that YOU want the thing to be a dud but they are in it only for the money. The 4:3 Display was a nice touch as well. Figuring that they usually cost more to manufacture, and that they are now inappropriate for viewing most types of video entertainment, and that most people find 16:9 a "more comfortable for the eye" ratio… You are one deviously vengeful CEO!

Thanks for reading my letter (if you ever did) I hope you find comfort in knowing that at least one Techie out there did get the message and would have liked the joke a whole lot more if others had laughed along. I wish you the best with your vengeance and hope that in time “they” will get the message and shut up. But unfortunately, it (the iPAD) will probably sell better than it should and you (or the next Apple CEO) will spend the next few years perfecting the next generations of the iPad. (The choice of the name probably was part of the vengeance, was it?)

Truly not a fan of the brand,

Cyberpest.

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