It’s a week for slapping people on the wrists—or other miscellaneous body parts—as misbehavior runs rampant! First, serial jerk Michael Arrington has some misdirected complaints. That’s not unusual, but Steve Jobs getting into a fracas with a pushy college student? Timeouts for both of you! Finally, corporate IT shops making excuses to avoid deploying iPhones? Who saw that coming?
Define “dropped”
Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington, who famously quit the iPhone last year, has given it another try and says he forgot how bad it is.
Sure you did, Michael.
Arrington’s main beef with the iPhone remains the same: dropped calls. Miraculously, he manages to rehash his complaints of July 2009 without mentioning AT&T once. It’s like he took last year’s screed, ran it through an AT&T filter, and republished it.
Don’t get the Macalope wrong. It’s terrible that Arrington had a bad experience and the horny one feels just awful that he got cut off during what were probably very important conversat-HAHAHAHAHA!
Oh, God, the Macalope can’t say that with a straight face! Ahhh, well, the Macalope would feel terrible if it were anyone else, but let’s face it: this is Michael Arrington we’re talking about.
Isn’t it reasonable to consider that, given it’s him on one end of the phone, there’s a very real chance those aren’t technically “dropped” calls?
Read more…
Here endeth the lesson
The Macalope hopes you’re sitting down. Because—and he hates to be the bearer of ill tidings—it appears that Steve Jobs may be a big meanie.
Assuming the e-mails published by the Guardian are authentic (and, let’s face it, if it isn’t Steve, it’s a pretty good impression), Jobs told a college journalism student who e-mailed him because she was having trouble contacting Apple PR:
Our goals do not include helping you get a good grade. Sorry.
Well, he did say “sorry”.
When the Macalope first read this story he thought, oh, no, it’s another instance of Jobs keying ill-advised responses to e-mails. Why does he do that? Can’t he hire a cadre of Pollyannas to handle his email? Well, in this instance at least, there seem to be some extenuating circumstances.
For starters, the student, one Chelsea Kate Isaacs, repeatedly pleads that a response is “essential to [her] academic performance.”
Chelsea, Chelsea, Chelsea. Whining isn’t going to get you anywhere with Steve. And come on, your grades really are your responsibility, not Apple’s. If your project desperately hinged on a response from Apple—which half the time doesn’t respond to professional journalists—then you hitched your cart to the wrong wagon.
Also, calling the company hypocritical for making products that make students lives easier but not responding quickly to the inquiries of student journalists just borders on the ludicrous. Enough with the passive/aggressive claptrap.
Most importantly, however, your biggest mistake was probably right under your nose in your e-mail sig:
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile
Pro tip, Chelsea. When e-mailing mercurial CEOs asking them for favors, you might not want to deliberately point out that you’re using a competitor’s product.
Anyway, Chelsea gets more irate and practically demands a response prompting Steve to tell her to “leave us alone.”
Perhaps Steve’s best PR move here would have been to not respond to the first e-mail at all. But you know he enjoyed tapping “Send” on that last one.
Besides, everyone needs a hobby.
No iPhones, but we do have Hawaiian shirt Fridays
Surprise, surprise! As corporate IT shops are replacing their increasingly dated BlackBerries, they’re leaning more heavily on Android than the iPhone.
Corporations are jumping on the Google smartphone bandwagon, with Android device growth outpacing Apple’s iPhone 20-fold in the last three months, a market researcher said Wednesday.
This isn’t to say that the iPhone isn’t making gains, but the horny one has said it before and he’ll say it again:
It’s not so much that the iPhone isn’t ready for the enterprise, it’s that the enterprise isn’t ready for the iPhone.
Of course, some of the bias toward Android is simply because it’s available on a lot of different carriers, but let’s not kid ourselves. There’s another force at play here.
Periodically over the last three years, the pasty cave trolls that run corporate IT shops have emerged from the server room to deliver yet another reason not to allow people to use iPhones. First it was the lack of deployment tools, next it was incompatibility with Exchange, then it was security. One after the other, these were shown to be a smokescreen.
It made sense when they were still using BlackBerries—they were designed to pass those tests, if not the tests of elegant interface and hardware design. But Android is no better than the iPhone in any of those areas and is arguably worse in security. Next we’ll hear that corporate shops can’t deploy iPhones because they don’t come with those boss belt holsters.
Look, just face it, corporate IT: you’re prejudiced. You can publish all the white papers you want, but the truest bullet point is the one you don’t have the guts to put in print: you just don’t like Apple.
Which is fine. You’re only hurting yourselves.
Well, and all those poor employees. So maybe it’s not fine.