Is Fake Steve better than the real thing?

I suspect more people read what Fake Steve has to say purely because the real Steve has so little to say outside tightly scripted keynotes. The exception to that might be when Steve has to step in to make sure that the Directors know their proper role in a stockholders' meeting. I think the Steve Jobs' thong is a hoot especially after the iPod sex toy brouhaha. Still, the Fake Steve phenomenon is not exactly hard to explain. Steve, as brilliant as he is, rarely shares any personal thoughts with mere peons like us.

Of course Apple's "enlightened" blogging policy reminds me more of the fenced chickens than it does anything else. That being the case we are not going to hear any back door snippets of Steve either. If Steve is the spokesperson for almost all things Apple, perhaps he no longer has time for any personal thoughts?

As the Apple world is ramping up for WWDC, most of the rest of the world is getting ready for summer and exceedingly high gas prices. If you ask one hundred people what WWDC stands for, I'm pretty sure you'll only find one or two that know the answer even if Apple's market share is rising from oblivion.

That reminds of the odd paradox that WWDC often brought to internal Apple people, especially those of us on the east coast. It was the only time that I thought perhaps Steve Jobs was actually a little insecure.

Each year we would go through a charade of trying to prepare customers for the possibly-maybe opportunity of being invited to our facility to see whatever Steve had decided to let the developers of the world and a selected few see.

Since federal government CIOs (and in fact every CIO that I know) are busy folks, they often do not want to take the time to see something which has nothing to do with their mission. Having an event where you don't know the content of the main speaker is challenging to sell to anyone but the already faithful.

But every year we sold precisely that idea of listening to Steve successfully. We always had some very important people who wanted to see the keynote but could not justify a trip to see an undefined something or other. Thus we would try to get approval to have customers join us in Apple's soon to be abandoned 1892 Preston White Drive facility.

Each time we wanted to do this, it had to be approved by Steve Jobs himself. I distinctly remember (note to Apple legal, I have a good memory and don't have the email) that with one of the approvals came a copy of correspondence between Steve Jobs and Katie Cotton.

Steve was asking Katie if it was okay to let customers into the Reston facility for the WWDC Keynote. That almost floored me. I had seen Avie Tevanian himself sweat bullets over potentially missing a meeting with Steve. I was around to witness Apple vice presidents almost collapse in relief when they had escaped a meeting without being a Steve target. Finally I watched typically haughty Apple marketing folks almost abandon great projects just because Steve might not like it, or that it might not have perfect results.

Then here was Steve asking Katie for permission. What was that all about? Maybe I'll ask Fake Steve Jobs.

http://viewfromthemountain.typepad.com/applepeels/2007/05/is_fake_steve_m.html