Levinson urged a little humility. “Let’s try to figure out if there’s something wrong,” he said. When he again mentioned the perception that Apple was arrogant, Jobs didn’t like it. It went against his black-white, right-wrong way of viewing the world. Apple was a company of principle, he felt. If others failed to see that, it was their fault, not a reason for Apple to play humble.
Jobs’s second reaction was to be hurt. He took the criticism personally and became emotionally anguished. “At his core, he doesn’t do things that he thinks are blatantly wrong, like some pure pragmatists in our business,” Levinson said. “So if he feels he’s right, he will just charge ahead rather than question himself.” Levinson urged him not to get depressed. But Jobs did. “Fuck this, it’s not worth it,” he told Levinson.
Finally Tim Cook was able to shake him out of his lethargy. He quoted someone as saying that Apple was becoming the new Microsoft, complacent and arrogant.
The next day Jobs changed his attitude. “Let’s get to the bottom of this,” he said.
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When the data about dropped calls were assembled from AT&T, Jobs realized there was a problem, even if it was more minor than people were making it seem. So he flew back from Hawaii. But before he left, he made some phone calls. It was time to gather a couple of trusted old hands, wise men who had been with him during the original Macintosh days thirty years earlier.
His first call was to Regis McKenna, the public relations guru. “I’m coming back from Hawaii to deal with this antenna thing, and I need to bounce some stuff off of you,” Jobs told him. They agreed to meet at the Cupertino boardroom at 1:30 the next afternoon. The second call was to the adman Lee Clow. He had tried to retire from the Apple account, but Jobs liked having him around. His colleague James Vincent was summoned as well.
Jobs also decided to bring his son Reed, then a high school senior, back with him from Hawaii. “I’m going to be in meetings 24/7 for probably two days and I want you to be in every single one because you’ll learn more in those two days than you would in two years at business school,” he told him. “You’re going to be in the room with the best people in the world making really tough decisions and get to see how the sausage is made.” Jobs got a little misty-eyed when he recalled the experience. “I would go through that all again just for that opportunity to have him see me at work,” he said. “He got to see what his dad does.”
They were joined by Katie Cotton, the steady public relations chief at Apple, and seven other top executives. The meeting lasted all afternoon. “It was one of the greatest meetings of my life,” Jobs later said.
He began by laying out all the data they had gathered.
“Here are the facts. So what should we do about it?”
McKenna was the most calm and straightforward.
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“Just lay out the truth, the data,” he said. “Don’t appear arrogant, but appear firm and confident.” Others, including Vincent, pushed Jobs to be more apologetic, but McKenna said no. “Don’t go into the press conference with your tail between your legs,” he advised. “You should just say: ‘Phones aren’t perfect, and we’re not perfect. We’re human and doing the best we can, and here’s the data.’” That became the strategy. When the topic turned to the perception of arrogance, McKenna urged him not to worry too much.
“I don’t think it would work to try to make Steve look humble,” McKenna explained later. “As Steve says about himself, ‘What you see is what you get.’”
At the press event that Friday, held in Apple’s auditorium, Jobs followed McKenna’s advice. He did not grovel or apologize, yet he was able to defuse the problem by showing that Apple understood it and would try to make it right. Then he changed the framework of the discussion, saying that all cell phones had some problems. Later he told me that he had sounded a bit
“too annoyed” at the event, but in fact he was able to strike a tone that was unemotional and straightforward.
He captured it in four short, declarative sentences:
“We’re not perfect. Phones are not perfect. We all know that. But we want to make our users happy.”
If anyone was unhappy, he said, they could return the phone (the return rate turned out to be 1.7%, less than a third of the return rate for the iPhone 3GS or most other phones) or get a free bumper case from Apple. He went on to report data showing that other mobile phones had similar problems. That was not totally true.
Apple’s antenna design made it slightly worse than most other phones, including earlier versions of the iPhone. But it was true that the media frenzy over the iPhone 4’s dropped calls was overblown. “This is blown so out of proportion that it’s incredible,” he said. Instead
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of being appalled that he didn’t grovel or order a recall, most customers realized that he was right.
The wait list for the phone, which was already sold out, went from two weeks to three. It remained the company’s fastest-selling product ever. The media debate shifted to the issue of whether Jobs was right to assert that other smartphones had the same antenna problems. Even if the answer was no, that was a better story to face than one about whether the iPhone 4 was a defective dud.
Some media observers were incredulous. “In a bravura demonstration of stonewalling, righteousness, and hurt sincerity, Steve Jobs successfully took to the stage the other day to deny the problem, dismiss the criticism, and spread the blame among other smartphone makers,” Michael Wolff of newser.com wrote. “This is a level of modern marketing, corporate spin, and crisis management about which you can only ask with stupefied incredulity and awe: How do they get away with it? Or, more accurately, how does he get away with it?” Wolff attributed it to Jobs’s mesmerizing effect as “the last charismatic individual.” Other CEOs would be offering abject apologies and swallowing massive recalls, but Jobs didn’t have to. “The grim, skeletal appearance, the absolutism, the ecclesiastical bearing, the sense of his relationship with the sacred, really works, and, in this instance, allows him the privilege of magisterially deciding what is meaningful and what is trivial.”
Scott Adams, the creator of the cartoon strip Dilbert, was also incredulous, but far more admiring. He wrote a blog entry a few days later (which Jobs proudly emailed around) that marveled at how Jobs’s “high ground maneuver” was destined to be studied as a new public relations standard. “Apple’s response to the iPhone 4 problem didn’t follow the public relations
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playbook, because Jobs decided to rewrite the playbook,” Adams wrote. “If you want to know what genius looks like, study Jobs’ words.” By proclaiming up front that phones are not perfect, Jobs changed the context of the argument with an indisputable assertion.
“If Jobs had not changed the context from the iPhone 4
to all smartphones in general, I could make you a hilarious comic strip about a product so poorly made that it won’t work if it comes in contact with a human hand. But as soon as the context is changed to ‘all smartphones have problems,’ the humor opportunity is gone. Nothing kills humor like a general and boring truth.”
Here Comes the Sun
There were a few things that needed to be resolved for the career of Steve Jobs to be complete.
Among them was an end to the Thirty Years’ War with the band he loved, the Beatles. In 2007 Apple had settled its trademark battle with Apple Corps, the holding company of the Beatles, which had first sued the fledgling computer company over use of the name in 1978. But that still did not get the Beatles into the iTunes Store. The band was the last major holdout, primarily because it had not resolved with EMI music, which owned most of its songs, how to handle the digital rights.
By the summer of 2010 the Beatles and EMI had sorted things out, and a four-person summit was held in the boardroom in Cupertino. Jobs and his vice president for the iTunes Store, Eddy Cue, played host to Jeff Jones, who managed the Beatles’ interests, and Roger Faxon, the chief of EMI music. Now that the Beatles were ready to go digital, what could Apple offer to make that milestone special? Jobs had been anticipating this day for a long time. In fact he and his advertising team, Lee Clow and James Vincent, had
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mocked up some ads and commercials three years earlier when strategizing on how to lure the Beatles on board.
“Steve and I thought about all the things that we could possibly do,” Cue recalled. That included taking over the front page of the iTunes Store, buying billboards featuring the best photographs of the band, and running a series of television ads in classic Apple style. The topper was offering a $149 box set that included all thirteen Beatles studio albums, the two-volume “Past Masters” collection, and a nostalgia-inducing video of the 1964 Washington Coliseum concert.
Once they reached an agreement in principle, Jobs personally helped choose the photographs for the ads. Each commercial ended with a still black-and-white shot of Paul McCartney and John Lennon, young and smiling, in a recording studio looking down at a piece of music. It evoked the old photographs of Jobs and Wozniak looking at an Apple circuit board. “Getting the Beatles on iTunes was the culmination of why we got into the music business,” said Cue.
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CHAPTER FORTY
