James Plamondon: "Microsoft's PR people are distancing from my 1996 presentation, saying that the approach to evangelism that it describes was not then, and is not now, Microsoft's policy." 

Why should we cheer for Steve's patents? 

Michael Gartenberg and Steven Levy together, pull the truth out of Steve Jobs on why the iPhone doesn't run software written by developers. But it's not the truth that Jobs would have you believe.

Anyway, it was not actually a great PR week for Jobs. All that hype from Apple about patents as if they were somehow good news for users, exposes how ludicrous the whole Apple marketing system is. That they're now getting called on it, if not by the mainstream guys, but by bloggers, shows you how there's a new system of checks and balances. We're watching the people who were supposedly our eyes and ears, and finding out that they're playing footsie with the guys they're covering, and have been for a long, long time.

Now Apple is not only playing hardball with bloggers, they're pushing around another giant Silicon Valley company, one with deep pockets and expensive lawyers, as they try to roll over Cisco over the iPhone trademark.

Meanwhile, the option backdating mess is still there, hasn't gone away, and I don't think the SEC is going to be rolled over as easily as Cisco or as the press used to.

And you gotta ask yourself when it's going to completely flip over, when a reporter that grants embargos to big tech companies like Apple or Microsoft is going to have to explain why they never run bad news about these companies. That's an even bigger scandal, imho, than the option backdating one. Me, I'm proud that I'm not invited to Apple or Microsoft events, as long as they're running such ethically compromised PR. And yes, I believe there is an ethics to PR, it's the mirror image of the ethics of reporters. Vendors must respect that reporters must write what they believe, not what the companies want them to write. That I'm not invited is how you know that I haven't compromised. Can't say the same for other bloggers, however. Lots of people dipping into the same poisoned well that the MSM guys did.

Valleywag is doing a great job of chasing this story, it goes deep into the culture of Silicon Valley.

Douglas Harding 

I got an email this morning from Richard Lang of headless.org saying that Douglas Harding, a truly great teacher, died last night. My view of existence, like that of many others, was heavily influenced by Harding.

5/5/97: "It's so easy to let what we've learned interfere with what we can observe."