Without a doubt Steve Jobs was one of the great innovators and entrepreneurs of our time. He not only took his company Apple Inc. to new heights, but also achieved so much in his career that others can only dream about. However, the co-founder and CEO of Apple was not an easy person to work with, as he was highly exacting, demanding and on top of it Jobs sometimes showed irrational behaviour according to employees. Nevertheless, all this was part of his charismatic personality because of which most of the employees in the Cupertino-based company adored him. But Erin Caton, who had worked with Jobs on the MobileMe project thinks otherwise, as she blames the former CEO of Apple for the poor launch of the MobileMe service.
MobileMe was basically an email service, which was offered to users for a $100 per year, but unfortunately it did not launch well and eventually ended up losing emails. So when this email service failed Jobs gathered his MobileMe team in the auditorium of Apple and gave his most infamous speech by saying that, “You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation … You should hate each other for having let each other down.” After that legendary reaction Jobs fired the head of MobileMe service then and there.
But Caton on the other hand says that it was actually Jobs, who failed to guide the MobileMe service to a successful launch. In fact, the team behind MobileMe worked all night on the service in order to fix its bugs, but after finishing their work, Jobs called them to the auditorium and “chewed them out.”
She says, “We had been telling our bosses that we did not feel confident about our launch date for a long time. We gave any number of suggestions of what we could do to launch that wouldn’t be such a giant production, but would totally have worked. Somewhere up the chain of command, it was decided it was not the Apple-way to launch something without a million fireworks.”
She continued, “He stood in front of us and yelled at us, told us that we should be mad at each other, said we could have done a staggered launch and complained that we didn’t even try to do all the things that we (those on the ground floor of production that actually make the f***king products of the world) had been begging to do. It was the world’s best de-motivational speech.”
According to Caton, Jobs did not pay any attention to MobileMe team’s warning therefore it was his own mess.
Source: iPhoneinCanada
Photo: Forbes