Fake Steve

I used to love reading the Fake Steve Jobs blog back in 2009/2010. He was mercilessly funny when discussing the OLPC project: https://www.fakesteve.net/tag/olpc

Or as FakeSteveJobs [1] put it: "You know what? I love competing with Microsoft. I really do." Microsoft was never really a consumer product company. It's main money makers, Windows and Office have always depended mainly on business and enterprise. Compare with Apple who always had their eye on home computing since inception. [1] http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/10/whats-the-1-most-crazy-idea-steve-bal…

That's refreshing to know, however I feel that it should be clearly mentioned in their names policy. Also, I take away from this quote that an account such as Fake Steve Jobs would not be allowed, right? Daniel Lyons, the editor behind the Fake Steve identity, revealed himself after 14 months and his anonymity was pretty cool. http://www.fakesteve.net/ https://twitter.com/#!/FSJ

I guess it's good news if it means less movies starring him... Did you see Killers? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1103153/ I did, and I'm sorry. There was a great piece about Ashton and Demi by Fake Steeve Jobs; here it is: http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/10/i-just-had-weirdest-meeting-with-asht… That said I'm sure he's a really nice guy and all; but why would startups need celebrities? Having actors endorse your products in ads is one thing; having them hang around in the office is another... Isn't that a little distracting?

Did anyone else think the article would be about Dan Lyons (aka 'Fake Steve Jobs')? Having several fake Steve Jobses gets pretty confusing. (The other fake Steve: http://www.fakesteve.net)

It's worth pointing out the one major relevant fact they didn't cover, that Fake Steve Jobs pointed out at the end of last year: every quarter after the first "iPhone Christmas" (4Q07, the first Christmas after the release of the first iPhone), AT&T's had lower wireless capital expenditures (capex): http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/12/att-by-the-numbers.html (through 3Q09 at least). AT&T made a conscious choice to maintain its operating and net earnings at the expense of its quality of service (something we've heard detailed bits and pieces about, e.g. insufficient backhaul, like this article's comments on the not much used in the US market chip Apple used/uses). We'll see if that was a good choice as Verizon et. al. converge on LTE along with AT&T.

Perhaps the real attitude is summed up best by Fake Steve through satire (http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/06/there-is-no-spoon.html): "So some guy says his iPhone 4 is having reception issues. I say there is no reception issue. Now it’s his reality against my reality. Which one of us is living in the real reality? There’s a two-part answer: 1, there is no real reality, and 2, it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is which reality our customers will choose to adopt as their own. Of course most people would rather live in a reality where everything works and there are no problems. And now, thanks to me, that reality exists. Because I’ve created that reality for them."

I don't know, Lyons tends to be really hit or miss with these. The style just doesn't feel right on this one, at least compared to some of the razor-sharp classics such as the Randall Stephenson one: http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/12/a-not-so-brief-chat-with-randall-step… Still, the close was fantastic: That is all for now. For a longer explanation of why these changes make sense, stay tuned to John Gruber.

http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/04/gruber-wants-to-make-a-citizens-arres… Fake Steve Jobs: "John, dude, I love you like a son, but you’re letting this get to you, it’s getting under your skin, you need to let it go"

Yes, I think it marks a certain level of success/fame when someone takes the time to make a parody of you. Most Saturday Night Live skits for example or http://www.fakesteve.net/

I had a comment on why I think articles like this one are silly, but remembered Fake Steve did a much better job here: http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/07/lets-all-take-deep-breath-and-get-som… For example, from this Atlantic article: "Microsoft never got its collective head into competing against the simple and free stuff available on the Web." Fake Steve: "They're starting to look like the new Scott McNealy. Remember him? Ran a company called Sun, which had a great little business going until McNealy became obsessed with Gates and started doing things like paying millions of dollars to buy StarOffice so he could get into that booming free software business."

The iPhone was highly, highly anticipated. For years, people were conjecturing about it. In 2006, Dan Lyons, under the pseudonym "Fake Steve Jobs", joked coincidentally that the iPhone would have only one button: "Our designers tell me we need at least 12 buttons so we can have all the numbers plus * and # symbols. I’m telling them to go back and do it over. I want one button. No more, no less. One."[1] One of the reasons for all this speculation is that smartphones totally sucked back then. Russell Beattie, one of the main mobile/smartphone bloggers at the time, wrote a great piece in 2004: "Steve Jobs has a mobile phone. I'm not sure which mobile phone it is, but he's definltely got one. And he hates it. He curses at it every day. He hates it like he hated the original IBM PC. He hates how hard it is to add contacts and make calls and he cringes at the web experience and the Java games, if he's even bothered to try them. He holds it in his hand during long trips and admires some things about it, but knows he could do it better. He knows that if Apple decided to make a mobile phone, it would be the most intuitive and elegant mobile phone in the world."[2] It's hard to understand how bad the situation was without actually using the mobile computing technology that existed at the time. In the late 90's, I had owned a couple generations of Palm PDAs, which were pretty good, but I stopped carrying a PDA around because I didn't want to fill my pockets with both a Palm and a…

http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/06/there-is-no-spoon.html "Probably the biggest thing I’ve taught the team at Apple is that people never know what they’re supposed to think about anything. This is true in Hollywood, in the book business, in the art world, in politics. And especially in technology. "So we put out a new phone and everyone is sitting there wondering what they should think about it. What I realized many years ago — and honestly, it still amazes me — is that most people are so unsure of themselves that they will think whatever we tell them to think. "So we tell people that this new phone is not just an incremental upgrade, but rather is the biggest breakthrough since the original iPhone in 2007. We say it’s incredible, amazing, awesome, mind-blowing, overwhelming, magical, revolutionary. We use these words over and over. "It’s all patently ridiculous, of course. But people believe it." .... "Which brings me back to iPhone 4 and the antenna issue. Right now you’re confused. You’re worried. You don’t know what to believe. You just wish someone would come along and tell you that everything is squared away and there’s nothing to worry about." "Well, stay tuned for that. And remember: There is no spoon."

I wish http://www.fakesteve.net/ could be as succinct.

Poor Oscar was just click-baiting, like the Paris Review. Here, have a Fake Steve of 2011 vintage: http://www.fakesteve.net/2011/01/my-talk-with-a-left-wing-hack.html Same old, but it seems ages ago.

Reminds me of http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/11/hell-hath-no-fury-like-a-borgocrat-sc…

This is a well honed Apple bullshit technique called 'clouding' - http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/06/there-is-no-spoon.html

Did solar panel company Miasole ever recover from the branding of "My Ass Hole"? http://www.fakesteve.net/2007/05/john-doerrs-my-asshole-company-is.htm…

The title should make clear the link is to a piece written in January 2011, when the real Steve took a medical leave of absence. For a more recent item by Dan Lyons, see his rambling but powerful eulogy: http://www.fakesteve.net/2011/10/one-last-thing-r-i-p-steve-jobs.html

It may have originated with FSJ: And you know what? There is something really evil about taking thousands of the world’s smartest young people and using them to sell online text ads more efficiently. Really. Think of all the really interesting and important things that this pool of brainpower could be addressing. April 2008: http://www.fakesteve.net/2008/04/google-putting-up-fence-and-gate-to.h…

http://www.fakesteve.net/2011/01/im-totally-fine-but-goodbye-for-now.h… "I hope that when you see stories like that - because you will - you use their comment strings to express your outrage for being the kind of scumbags who would put their own hunger for unique visitors and pageviews ahead of a man’s right to privacy."

It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster. http://www.fakesteve.net/2008/02/ballmer-im-completely-out-of-ideas.ht…

Fake Steve Jobs, http://www.fakesteve.net/2007/11/this-writers-strike-cracks-me-up.html… There's an attribution after the last quote.

"Remember when I said that netbooks aren't good at anything and they're just cheap laptops?" http://www.fakesteve.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/original.jpeg Knew you did.

Fake Steve on mainframes: http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/10/why-ibm-is-in-trouble-with-antitrust.… http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/10/case-against-ibm-continued.html

Fake Steve was eerily prescient here. From June 24: "First of all, this is not a big issue. If you’re experiencing this, most likely it’s not the phone at all — most likely you’re just living in a place where there’s bad reception, in which case the solution is simple: you need to move." http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/06/you-assholes-need-to-stop-sending-ema… Compare that to the real thing: "Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place."

Fake Steve Jobs: http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/04/please-stop-thinking-about-gizmodo-do…

Except for that other iPhone prototype guy who lost an iPhone and either committed suicide after "intense interrogation", or was killed: http://gizmodo.com/5319275/report-iphone-leak-interrogations-drive-fox… http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/07/im-really-thinking-maybe-i-shouldnt.h… So, yeah, losing an iPhone prototype is really, like, boring.

really thought this was going to be a Fake Steve Jobs post about Jonathan Schwartz: http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/02/my-little-pony-a-look-back.html

Reality distortion field. See Fake Steve Jobs: "I’ve made this suggestion before but let me try this again: Why don’t you fucktards just stop trying to predict what we’re going to put out? Why not just show up like everyone else, sit there with your notebooks on your lap and your hands in the clap position and just wait to hear what the fuck we say and then cheer wildly like a pack of idiots when we give you the "applause" cue? Is that so fucking hard? I mean, Mossberg and Pogue manage to do it, right? How hard can it be?" http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/10/gruber-grubers-self-gets-downgraded.h…