July 20, 2010 Steve Jobs Attacks Media Over iPhone Problem
NYT – By now, most people know what happens when your fingers come in contact with the lower left-hand corner of the iPhone 4 — are you there? — but it took the touch of an old-line, nontech tester of technology to get Apple to admit as much.
When Steve Jobs took the stage on Friday to defend the iPhone 4 against criticism that it had reception problems, he made his feelings about the press abundantly, peevishly clear.
“This has been blown so out of proportion that it’s incredible. It’s fun to have a story, but it’s not fun to be on the other side,” he told reporters.
Even as he apologized and acknowledged that there was indeed a problem, he was joined by Scott Forstall, a senior vice president at Apple, who attacked an article in The New York Times that blamed an interaction with the phone’s software as “patently false,” and then Mr. Jobs went on to call a Bloomberg article that suggested the company knew about the problem last year a “total crock.”
In general, he suggested that media organizations were just making blood sport of a company that had sold three million handsets in just three weeks: “I guess it’s just human nature, when you see someone get successful you just want to tear it down.”
The iPhone’s antenna problems might have remained a dust-up between Apple fanboys and skeptical bloggers except that Consumer Reports — that stolid, old-media tester of everything from flooring to steam mops for the last 74 years — came out with a report detailing the issue and concluding that “due to this problem, we can’t recommend the iPhone 4.”
How did Consumer Reports make Apple blink? In large measure, the article in Consumer Reports was devastating precisely because the magazine (and its Web site) are not part of the hotheaded digital press. Although Gizmodo and other techie blogs had reached the same conclusions earlier, Consumer Reports made a noise that was heard beyond the Valley because it has a widely respected protocol of testing and old-world credibility. Mr. Jobs acknowledged as much, saying, “We were stunned and upset and embarrassed by the Consumer Reports stuff, and the reason we didn’t say more is because we didn’t know enough.”
The organization — Consumer Reports is owned by the nonprofit Consumers Union — sells its subscribers dutiful research rather than pithy discourse, and it often goes unnoticed unless you are in the market for a new car or toaster. This time, its tests became an inflection point. (One that many tech reporters say Consumer Reports promoted endlessly, but who can blame them?)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/business/media/19carr.html
Tags: Consumer Reports, Credibility, Crisis PR, Criticism, IPhone, Media, Recalls, Steve Jobs
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Permalink # Opinion: Steve Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field Clashes With AntennaGate :: App Advice said
[...] Jobs definitely left the impression at the conference that the evil press, vengeful bloggers, and jealous competitors had unfairly targeted Apple. The fact that the iPhone 4 [...]