How Apple Nurtured Fake Steve

If there's a God in Heaven, our last word on the Fake Steve saga.

To the extent that Apple and its PR chieftains are annoyed by the hilarious satire of Forbes writer Daniel Lyons, which is now moving to Forbes.com after his unmasking, they have no one to blame but themselves.

It’s no surprise to Apple watchers: the company’s PR and ad strategies are characterized by favoritism and long-standing grudges. It rotates exclusive access to its executives among a carefully selected number of reporters at Newsweek, Time, Fortune, Business Week, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Other publications - most notably Forbes – are shut out.

Why doesn’t Apple advertise in Forbes, or provide its reporters access to its chief executive? One could trace the ill will back to Forbes’s misguided December, 1996 cover on then-Apple chief executive Gil Amelio – which predicted that a visionary Mr. Amelio would revitalize the company by purchasing the Be operating system. The article was published about a week before Apple instead bought Steve Jobs’s startup NeXT, triggering the sequence of events that would lead to Mr. Amelio’s ouster and Apple’s new golden era.

In the process, Apple, which hated the cover, ex-communicated Forbes and its reporters, leaving them to linger on the periphery. And what do you do when you’re out in the cold and there’s a fun party inside? You lob water balloons through the window.

To be sure, Dan Lyons created Fake Steve himself and only later told his bosses. But Apple inadvertently nurtured the character by giving Forbes nothing to lose by keeping Mr. Lyons’ secret, and now, by bringing Fake Steve in-house.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/08/how-apple-nurtured-fake-steve/