Ask 10 folks in Silicon Valley for their favorite post from The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, the satirical blog by an anonymous writer channeling Apple's chief executive, and you'll likely get 10 different answers. about IBM ( ) CEO 's visit to Apple ( ) headquarters, which begins, You may not know this if you're not in the industry but IBMers are a bit like Roman Catholic nuns. They never travel in groups of less than 20.
It includes Palmisano's compliments on Apple's iPod compact disc player and his questions about whether the iPod Shuffle is a tie clip or mouse. Then about a conversation with Apple director , who supposedly tells Jobs he's suffering from depression, is wacky as a dime watch, and has to step off the board so he can run for President again. Or how about about how Yoko Ono screwed up licensing talks to get the Beatles' music included on iTunes.
We're drinking green tea on the floor of her living room and she's insisting that when we put the music up on iTunes that the band must be called 'John Lennon and the Beatles' and she must be listed as a member of the group. Her big tactic is just to repeat things over and over in this monotone voice, to wear you down mdash;it's a Japanese business tactic, they all do it hellip; and for a while I'm agreeing and trying to be all Zen about it, and Yoko is giving me the Zen right back, and we're both working our Zen and trying to be more passive-aggressive and monotone and repetitive than the other one, and finally I just snapped hellip; 'It's bad enough you broke up the greatest band of all time. Now you're gonna frig this up, too?
hellip; It's just a distribution deal!' She bows her head and says, in this voice that's barely more than a whisper, 'I will pray for your soul.' It ends, well, badly for both Jobs and Ono.
Since Secret Diary was started last year, the daily stream of such entries has made Fake Steve Jobs, or FSJ for short, required reading in Silicon Valley and beyond. It has quickly become Jon Stewart's Daily Show for the tech set. FSJ not only manages to hit many of the topics of the day, but its unfiltered satirical voice lets techies revel in their never-ending fascination of their own industry, and be entertained at the same time.
It's amazingly well read, in part because everybody gets a laugh, says Roger Kay, founder of tech consultancy Endpoint Technologies Associates. If you're just a poor schnook, you get to laugh at what an egomaniac [Jobs] is, and at all his billionaire friends. But if you're in the game, you get to laugh at how well [Fake Steve] seems to know Jobs and his world.
FSJ has zealously guarded his (or her) identity since the blog was started. But now, as his popularity has soared, the guessing game over the author's true identity has grown almost as entertaining as The Secret Diary itself. It's a blend of the search for Watergate's Deep Throat with the speculation over the authorship of Primary Colors, the fictional-but-oh-so-accurate account of a Clintonesque White House in the early 1990s.
The guesses are all over the map. Tech journalists and former Apple marketing staffers are popular choices.
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