
The day Steve Jobs dissed me hard - grep
http://sivers.org/itunes
======
guelo
All big companies spin and backtrack and screw people over, but what I think
sets apple apart is their lack of communications. If you're going to screw me
over please go ahead and tell me, preferably with a little notice. Don't make
me stew in my stress flying my business blind. It is a lack of respect.

------
netcan
Reading this I realized how scary Apple's reputation is, like you should
expect them to do spiteful things. I hear invited to be pitched by Steve,
pissed off their legal department, no answer... I would be wetting myself.

Reading this in 2003 probably wouldn't have had quite this effect.

~~~
radioactive21
It's Steve Jobs. He once went to a town hall meeting, just to tell them Apple
has been in the city for so and so years, and how he's expanding the HQ and
how things were going. That's all he wanted to say, nothing to complain about,
but just reminding them who Apple is.

~~~
radicaldreamer
He obviously wanted some tax breaks for Apple for staying in Cupertino.

------
bl4k
Lesson: pick unique price points so that you know when you are being dissed

------
mirkules
"Whatever. Fucking Apple.

We started encoding and uploading immediately."

What really struck me about this post is that he went back to Apple after
being disrespected so hard. The lesson is there are times when you have to
swallow a big lump of pride in order to better your business. I know I would
have a hard time doing that.

~~~
yardie
I'm sure there are hundreds if not thousands of developers that could say the
same of Microsoft.

Its probably the same for Walmart suppliers.

------
jamn
Playing the devil's advocate here.

I have bought more than a couple of CDs from CD Baby and thanks to them I've
been able to connect with more than a couple of wonderful artists.

However, from Apple's perspective, it must have seemed like CD Baby was simply
trying to make a profit simply by guaranteeing access to the Apple Store, and
therefore Apple decided not to move forward in order to protect its brand.

~~~
Lazlo_Nibble
Except that Apple _didn't_ decide not to move forward -- Sivers _assumed_ that
Apple had decided not to move forward, based on an offhand reference by Jobs
in a keynote.

~~~
sivers
Exactly. I think most of this timing was circumstance, not causal.

Maybe they were just busy dealing with the bigger labels first, and put a
positive public spin on their delay.

I was hanging on his every word, since we were hearing nothing else from them.
So his keynote seemed to be a decision. Instead, it was just an important
lesson on spin and circumstance.

~~~
mcantor
The whole fiasco could have been avoided if someone had simply gotten back to
you, though.

~~~
josefresco
Amazing how a company with 500K tracks wasn't assigned a rep inside Apple. Has
this changed?

------
angryasian
I really don't understand everyone's reverence for Steve Jobs, but to me this
shows how evil and manipulative he is ( not the first time hearing this about
him). What people call timing, I call intentional to openly put it out there
they want these independents, have others follow their lead and open their
stores to independent artists, and then openly and publicly call every other
service out there a joke because they let anyone on. Then the next day signing
the contract. I highly doubt its all just coincidental.

~~~
lisper
> I really don't understand everyone's reverence for Steve Jobs

This should help clarify it:

[http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ta?s=AAPL+Basic+Tech.+Analysis...](http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ta?s=AAPL+Basic+Tech.+Analysis&t=5y)

------
blr_hack
Steve jobs may be a much greater innovator. But surely, can learn a thing or
two, on integrity, from Derek Sivers.

Also this is a lesson in on how to have __only __loosely-coupled
relations/dependencies with other companies (particularly, if they are big).

When need to go for tightly-coupled ones dependencies, expect it to break, and
have a back-up plan.

------
dshep
Wow. Really interesting to see Steve spin the smaller music collection of
iTunes as a positive. I think this is going to make me consider his words more
closely in the future.

~~~
chunkbot
My personal favorite: Steve Jobs Says 7-Inch Tablets Are ‘Dead on Arrival’...
Apparently, these devices are too small for a pleasant touchscreen experience.

I typed this from my 3.5 inch iPhone.

~~~
chc
He said it's too small for an experience like you get on the iPad. And sure
enough, apps on the iPhone are much more simplistic than apps on the iPad.

~~~
cromulent
Yes. “7-inch tablets are tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone and
too small to compete with the iPad,” is what he said.

~~~
gscott
Likely Steve Jobs has a 7" iPad prototype on his desk now... He can throw out
a few remarks to try to stear people away from that size until Apple has that
size in the market.

~~~
kenjackson
Nobody reads anymore... not until the iPad came out with an eReader... now
reading is magical!

Steve Jobs is an absolute marketing genius. He's not exactly an unbiased
observer.

------
redthrowaway
"I asked again, saying we had over 100,000 albums, already ripped as lossless
WAV files, with all of the info carefully entered by the artist themselves,
ready to send to their servers with their exact specifications. They said
sorry - you need to use this software - there is no other way.

Ugh. That means we have to pull each one of those CDs off of the shelf again,
stick it in a Mac, then cut-and-paste every song title into that Mac software.
But so be it. If that's what Apple needs, OK."

It would take about a day for a competent programmer to figure out how to
automate this process.

~~~
sivers
We had already automated it. But Apple was insisting we not use our own
software or ripped files. That they had to come directly from the master audio
CD.

~~~
rottencupcakes
I think you're misreading him.

If you really had lossless wavs and data, you could have emulated a 'CD' and
had the apple software rip it, then put in the tags. Probably would have saved
thousands of man hours compared to putting physical CDs in the drives.

~~~
sivers
Oh well. :-)

All turned out wonderful in the end. We never needed to re-rip the CDs after
all. Apple took bulk-uploads the same as all the other companies. An
incredibly efficient way of delivering over 2 million songs+metadata from one
company to another.

A nice little collection of Ruby & PHP scripts on a stack of Linux servers &
Windows encoding boxes did everything.

Unfortunately I'm not allowed to open-source that software since I sold it.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>Apple took bulk-uploads the same as all the other companies.

Wouldn't it have been cheaper and quicker to send a few hard drives with the
data on by post?

~~~
petsos
It wouldn't be cheaper for Apple. They would need a lot more employes to
handle these hard drives.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Really, with just music files on from known good sources in an already fixed
format - I'm seeing them put it in a caddy, rip the files dumped from their
app via antivirus scrubbers to a network drive or other local HDD and then
[unfortunatley] chuck it in the bin. Would that be too hard?

They'd perhaps need an intern for that as a short term project. After the
initial c.900000 music file (100,000 albums) then uploading would probably be
more feasible.

900000 tracks of 5MB (assuming lossy compression) at 10Mbps would take over 40
days of 24-7 uploading (not allowing for errors and outages and such). 10Mbps
was still quite fast for uploads in 2003 I think (faster than the current
average in the US according to DSLreports). S-ATA RAID0 write bandwidth was
about 34MBps at the time, roughly 27 times faster than the network in-flow;
I'll assume read was faster and so this is the limit for disk-to-disk
transfer. Assuming shipping took a couple of days you'd expect to finish the
transfer a month quicker.

I'd be interested in how it would be cheaper for Apple for the initial round
to accept uploads only, especially given this retards the lead time (to
selling the tracks) by a month or more.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I'm genuinely curious as it seems I'm totally wrong on this point and HN'ers
have an obvious answer to why I'm wrong, could someone be so kind as to tell
me what glaring error I'm making in my analysis. Much obliged.

------
wccrawford
A good lesson about dealing with corporate giants.

~~~
sivers
Yeah. Made me wary to tie any future business too closely to any one big
company.

Also see <http://sivers.org/big-vs-little-clients>

~~~
wheels
Similar:

[http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/09/16/most-
startups-...](http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/09/16/most-startups-
should-be-deer-hunters/)

------
brisance
This is similar in a sense to how Adobe mishandled their "Flash on iOS" play,
right from the start. They took it for granted that Apple would allow Flash-
developed apps on the App Store.

------
jfb
I'm no going to defend Apple here, really, but rather to point out that Apple
tends to _understaff_ , and what may read as malignancy from the outside can
often be more charitably explained by too few people working too many hours.

~~~
kenjackson
Actually there's another guy from Apple on HN who is very clear that employees
at Apple get all their core work done in 40 hours. They work extra hours to go
above and beyond.

At least that's what he says...

~~~
jfb
That was not my experience. I'll leave it at that.

------
DanielN
"Maybe you can't appreciate this now, but the summer of 2003 was the biggest
turning point that independent music has ever had."

This has always struck me as interesting point from a music fan's perspective.
It seems like the confluence of a lot of factor's led to expansion of
independent music around this time.

2001, 2002 was around when cable and DSL prices started to drop outside of
major cities. The opening of Itunes. And seemingly a lot of big time
independent artists began to jump to major labels (or made major releases from
smaller labels) and released very successful albums. Death Cab for Cutie, The
Shines, and Modest Mouse off the top of my head.

Just an interesting phenomena I've always been curious about. This article was
eye opening as to what one of the key forces in this move might have been.

------
antidaily
"They edit!" Classic.

------
rdmlx
Good on you for refunding the $200,000.

------
tiagok
congrats, really, you had an amzing spirit of humility! my admiration goes to
you!

------
tunaslut
oh man, I saw this too early in the morning and read it as "The day Steve Jobs
_kissed_ me hard" :)

------
danielnicollet
This posts proves something that I feel many seem to forget at times. Despite
great products, Apple is human after all.

