Poor Steve Jobs. A Control Freak's Nightmare

Regular WSW readers won't believe their eyes, but (gasp!) we're starting to feel sorry for the Jerkoff. For a guy who likes to control everything, he must be living a nightmare. He’s battled enemies before: incompetent managers, a CEO he hired who then led a coup against him, engineers who dared to disagree with his brilliance. In most cases, he triumphed. Although John Scully got Apple’s board to boot him, he came back years later to turn the company around. He fired the engineers who dared to suggest a mouse should have two buttons. And after all, who can argue against the results: really, really cool devices like the iPod and the iPhone and a share price that’s still more than double what it was two years ago.

In fact, the cool factor is at the root of his loss of control. He knew his beautiful slick devices made all the other phones and music players look like bars of soap and would sell like hotcakes. And he had a lot of experience with the Macintosh. By keeping the operating system closed, he was able to control the price, keep demand high, and avoid the commoditization that sank a hundred PC clone makers.

He didn’t care that some analysts said he would have made billions more and even given Microsoft a run for world dominance if he had licensed his code to other computer makers. He didn’t really care about being number two in a market where you practically had no profit margin. And after all, there were signs that the iPod and iTunes were convincing people to switch to his more elegant, and really, really cool Macs. He just had to keep a tight grip on his code, and his deals with AT&T and the record companies.

But who would have thought that the iPhone would be so-o-o cool and in such demand that hackers would dare defy his wishes, that they would crack his elegant code so they could use the iPhone on any phone network they wished. And then there were those Chinese hackers, adding code so Chinese language software would run on their grey market iPhones. And now, that damned Norwegian hacker, DVD John, finding a way for folks to transfer their iTunes downloads to such clunkers like Nokia’s N series and that really ugly Palm Treo. And it might even be legal.

Poor Steve Jobs; he’s got to be going nuts here. It’s like trying to hold water with your bare hands. There are leaks all over the place – and not the kind you can trace. And this happening a guy who liked to tell Fortune magazine what photographer they should use for their annual cover suck-up about him.

There’s got to be someone he can fire. It’s that damn Internet. Word on a hack gets around even faster than he can slap a lawsuit on somebody. And those hackers are everywhere, not just within the reach of the U.S. courts. Beijing, Shanghai, Oslo? What’s a control freak to do? Maybe he’ll call Al Gore. Didn’t he start all this?

http://www.redherring.com/Home/23783