14 DAY TRIAL // Steve Jobs reportedly went ballistic during a meeting with fellow Apple employees following the launch of the MobileMe service whose poor start had garnered a negative review from their ‘friend’ in the tech media.
For those who are not very familiar with Apple’s cloud-based service, the company launched MobileMe as an upgrade to .Mac (dot Mac) in 2008.
The transition got mixed impressions, both from .Mac customers, and the technology-centric mass media.
Tech columnist Walt Mossberg, whose reviews generally favor Apple, had issued an analysis on the service containing negative impressions.
Seeing how it all went down, Jobs reportedly called out on the team that was supposed to ensure everything worked fine with MobileMe, and told them:
"You've tarnished Apple's reputation ... You should hate each other for having let each other down... Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing good things about us."
According to Adam Lashinsky’s latest Fortune feature - Inside Apple (available as an in-app purchase with the iPad magazine), the meeting took place at the auditorium on Apple's campus, a venue generally reserved for product demonstrations and launches.
That day, Jobs made sure everyone got a piece of his mind, reportedly asking the MobileMe team what the new product was supposed to do.
One of the team members offered a satisfactory answer, but since the service did not actually do that, the CEO could only reply back: "So why the f--- doesn't it do that?", according to the report.
Once the meeting was over, Steve Jobs reportedly named a number of executives to become the new team handling Apple’s Internet services, and dismantled most of the team that had built the original model.