Clearly, Steve Jobs is pissed. I would be, too. You pour thousands of hours collectively into a project like this and you want people to just use the damned thing, enjoy it, and have it change their lives on some level. That the media has churned up such a storm over this issue has got to be not-a-little-bit frustrating.

Apple’s media materials are always top notch, and what they produced highlighting the antenna design process at Apple, the tour of the inner sanctum of antenna design on campus, meet the standard. They included videos on apple.com and in the conference demonstrating the exact same signal loss on previous generation iPhones, along with phones from Nokia, Blackberry, HTC, and Samsung. Hold the phone in just the right way, signal drops. In fact, as Josh pointed out in the linked piece over at Apple Insider,

In June, Nokia’s official blog poked fun at the iPhone 4 “death grip” issue. The post included a variety of pictures showing a range of grips, encouraging consumers to feel free to hold their Nokia device any way they like without suffering any signal loss.

Users of the site then posted links to videos showing signal loss on several of Nokia’s handsets, as well as instructions from a Nokia manual warning users “to avoid touching the antenna area” and that “contact with antennas affects the communication quality.”

I waxed sarcastically on Twitter that Verizon’s cheeky attitude toward this antenna thing would bite them in the ass. I’m bummed the prediction isn’t wholly accurate in that I didn’t use Nokia as my case point. That would have made me far more prescient. At least someone looks foolish here. It’s never really smart to publish material dragging your competitors through the mud on untested, unconfirmed reports.

Which is why I’m on the fence about Apple doing just that in this case, dragging these other manufacturers into the ring with them on this issue.

As uncharacteristic as it is, I’m not sure they had another choice. This is a PR disaster. It’s a disaster specifically because it’s a nominally interesting story that has been spun out of Apple’s tight control, not because there is any more or less scandal to it. Their response strategy of choice is clearly to soften by deflection — get us all thinking about these other guys so we’re not so focused on the iPhone 4 soft spot.

Apple’s biggest issue in this mess is completely self-created, and it’s not that they created a phone that has a major antenna flaw (we know there’s a flaw, I’m just saying that’s not the biggest problem here). It’s that Steve Jobs stood on stage for the iPhone announcement and choose to point out that the antenna design is legendary, revolutionary, incredible, and then showed the world exactly where the antenna is. The fact that the world media has been so focused on the antenna is a problem of Apple’s own making. Given the tone and timbre of the press conference, it’s clear that Apple knows this. Their own duct tape solution is to give out the bumpers for free. It’s payola for those who bought the phone, love the phone, and want to keep the phone in spite of their problems with connectivity.

The other manufacturers have come out pissed. Rightfully so, but it sure is hard to defend indignation in the face of video evidence. Apple knows this. So does Nokia, RIM, Samsung. Best case result of Antennagate is that we all get the phone of our dreams because of a renewed focus on better, smarter, clearer antennas from all these manufacturers. At least we know from their responses so far that the intent may be there to do it, if only because Apple just made the target in Cupertino that much bigger.

In TechCrunch’s follow up, Arrington makes an ironically apt comparison. Job’s coming on stage to give all this data of the reality of the ecosystem, that 30-day returns at AT&T is about 1.7% — down from 6% for the iPhone 3GS, is akin to Facebook execs coming out to talk about how people really aren’t jumping off the service as a result of Facebook Privacygate 2009-10. But for all those affected — punditry, gadget hounds, privacy advocates, the works — those affected are not likely to change their opinions based on reported data from the company. People who feel betrayed by Facebook will not come back to the service as a result of a press conference. And folks like Arrington will continue to be as venomous as ever of the iPhone.

Anandtech has been leading the charge with data-driven coverage of this whole mess. After the iPhone iOS 4.0.1 update which mixed up all the bar data display across iPhones, they posted some terrific graphs which compare the dBm mapping to bars displayed to cover just what has changed on the phone and how it will help to convey more clearly what level of coverage you might be able to expect in a certain area.

So then, as long as Apple is trotting out the dog and pony show about their antenna labs, where was this data from them? If Anandtech is able to produce such terrific analysis as an external party, it seems only natural to have even greater expectations of Apple. Just because the Blackberry or Nokia drops two bars has no effective comparison to the iPhone dropping two bars without those dBm comparables — they’re just bars, tiny pixels that (as far as I understand it) have little relation to actual connectivity at all. On TWiT 255, Jerry Pournelle and Spencer Webb remind us that on digital phones, bars mean little; that a more effective indicator would be a lightbulb. If it’s on, you have signal. If it’s off, you don’t.

[UPDATE: Dammit. Gruber and Aaron Swartz beat me to this little bit of wisdom. I hate being late to the party.]

I got my iPhone 4 the day before it launched. I’ve dropped one call. I was talking to my dad, and driving through an area at the top of Sylvan Hill on highway 26 in Portland. With my iPhone 3Gs, I’d drop calls there every single day. With the iPhone 4, I’ve dropped only one, in spite of regular use in that area. Other than that, the phone has absolutely out-performed all my previous iPhones. I have a bumper, but I rarely use it. Yes, I’ll likely go get the refund Apple is offering for it, just cause, you know, 30 bucks.

Still, my impression here is not that Apple has perpetrated some kind of crime on consumers. I really do believe that Apple is learning as they go along based on data they’re collecting in real time. This is a monster of their own creation and is more a result of the death grip they have on their own communications, testing, and public relations policies than anything else. It’s a trade-off, and if you’re going to build policy around secrecy, this is the no-win scenario you have to be willing to confront. Kobayashi Maru, indeed.

No, no it’s not the most disgusting thing you could eat today, but it’s still tremendously disgusting. Insofar as it’s a reach to find anything surprising here, I suppose I’m chewing on the point that the Big Mac is, in fact, less disgusting than the Double-Down.

Wonder what the strategy is there?

WWDC Keynote Snooze

Part of the challenge was all about bad timing. In a special event months ago, Jobs took the stage and told the world that the iPhone SDK was coming, that all developer prayers would be answered, that they would have access to the iPhone core API’s, allowing the masses to write apps just like Apple does. They would just have to wait. Be patient. It’s coming.

Then, they seeded the developers. Certain developers. OK, not very many developers. Still, the applications that were teased out of the process looked good. Really good. The world was getting excited.

June. WWDC. iPhone3G has been leaked. The furor and frenzy about this next gen device is at an all time high. Devs are counting on Apple to deliver. The public is paying more attention to this developer conference than ever before. They’re tracking secret shipping manifests for boxes on the way to Apple stores. They’re lining up at the retail locations for this product that has not been announced. It’s a drumroll of a million crazed fetishists at terminal speeds.

It was an announcement for an announcement. The iPhone3G isn’t coming for another month. iPhone 2.0 firmware, another month. App Store, another month.

This challenge of timing is non-trivial, and most likely not an accident either. From the lay perspective, the market expected a punchline to this long-running joke; a release to the flood of expectation. What was announced yesterday underdelivered on those counts.

First, the next-gen phone is less than the market expected. Yes, we knew it was going to be 3G. Yes, we knew it would have GPS. Yes, we knew it would cost less. But Apple has a history of delivering so much more than expectation, of blowing away the market with things no one has thought of yet. The iPhone 3G satisfies the market. It does not blow it away. Where is the forward facing camera for handset video conferencing, for example? How did that rumor get so out of control? Where is the 32 GB model? 16 GB has been around a while in the iPhone, after all.

Second, the App Store. The keynote languished on and on and on with demos of software we’d seen, tools that developers had been discussing for months. Screenshots had been leaked. Apps are already running on millions of hacked phones. And we had to suffer through nearly an hour of old news from a platform stage architected to deliver WOW. There was no wow. (To be completely fair, the gaming apps are amazing. You should take a look at the keynote just to see what’s coming — cell phone manufacturers have been trying to reach this level of quality for a long, long time).

Third, OS X. The next version of OS X, 10.6, will be called Snow Leopard, and it’s likely the most interesting of the big WWDC 2008 stories so far. The news? No new features.

OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: Hidden Gem

Which, of course, is not true at all. According to Jobs, it’s an opportunity for Apple to take a step back, to focus on efficiency and security, and to build in some core evolution to the OS, while keeping on a one-release-per-year schedule. It’s a truly interesting strategy, actually, and bucks a pretty well accepted gestalt that for public consumption, there must be eye-candy. Apple is betting they can change the course of things with Snow Leopard.

And actually, they’re in a great position to do it. Look at Vista, for example. Microsoft took five years to build XP’s successor and where the OS has received it’s greatest criticism is in usability. The reason for the so-called XP Downgrade Program is because the company has put so much effort into making XP actually function over the years that it does meet user expectation at this point. If you go back in time 6-7 years, you can see Microsoft faced with the same question of direction in OS development that Apple took a stand on yesterday.

1. Focus work on XP and deliver core refinements that make the OS better, more stable, more expandable, more cooperative with more hardware, and increase performance and security… OR
2. Do everything in option 1, plus take several years to re-jigger the interface and add a bunch of eye-candy to the mix, completely changing the way users interact tactilely and visually with the OS, because then we’ll actually have something to talk about.

Vista, as it turns out, is the result of choosing option 2.

Leopard, on the other hand, is both widely accepted as structurally excellent, and functionally elegant. Users like to use it. They aren’t actually screaming for new features. They’re content with letting Apple define what it is they need to be excited about. Exposé. Dashboard. Bells. Whistles. Whatever. Apple is banking that they can cash in on this wide-eyed enthusiasm for the OS and take a break from delivering the bells and whistles, breathe deep and focus on building something truly next gen for the Mac platform.

While they’re at it, they’ll do something really special: they’ll get the consumer public excited about core OS technology. 64-bit. Multi-threading. Multicore. OpenCL. Javascript. They’ll have people using these terms, driving discussion they don’t really understand, and setting an expectation around OS excellence in a way that others will have to emulate to address. Again.

Apple has a recent history of defining a market dialog. Yesterday, they did it again. The keynote may have been a snoozer, but the hidden gems are special. In the coming months, watch how the company frames their discussion on core technology. Watch how they make it special, interesting, compelling for all-comers.

For the record, I’ll be buying a new iPhone. I don’t care about the 3G. I don’t really care about the GPS — the current system actually works quite well for me. I need the memory. And my wife needs an iPhone of her own. When Jobs made the announcement for the first iPhone, he said they’d targeted 10 Million phones by the end of 2008. Given the announcements yesterday, I don’t think 10 million is even in the cards — they’ll top 10 million before 10/1/08.

While it’s thrilling that the company has enough cash to cover the bond and the finding, investors should note: the company has likely learned very little from the experience.

Like most organizations the size of Apollo, when dealt a blow of this sort, executive leadership takes great strides to insulate operational elements of the company from potential disruption. It’s a hard thing to do, by the way, because the army of employees and faculty are savvy people, and they read their Google alerts daily on various court proceedings involving the company.

One way to calm the waters is to take a hard stance in favor of business as usual, pushing forward as if there were no legal troubles, no jury finding. And as such, the company learns nothing.

According to Apollo, troubles which allegedly lead to artificial inflation of the stock would have been the purview of former leadership, CEO Todd Nelson, who resigned at the bidding of the board on January 11, 2006. Nelson took a few down with him including former CFO Kenda Gonzales, who put the last nail in the coffin of this particular case when she testified that leadership did, in fact, bury a report germane to investors regarding enrollment practices.

“When we received the program-review report, we felt very strongly we did not want it basically tried in the press,” Gonzales told the federal court jury in Phoenix.

Apollo says they acted responsibly. That they consulted expert advisors on the issue. That the jury verdict is not supported by facts or law. Still, Nelson was resigned over the issue and, by in large, the organization shook off the affects of the transition to new CEO Brian Mueller without much trouble.

And as such, the company learns nothing.

I have no doubt that the company feels strongly about this latest storm. And may, based on the facts of the case, stand a better-than-reasonable chance at winning on appeal in the coming months. But none of that changes the fact that the rank and file in the organization operate a guerilla enrollment operation based on numbers and head-count — even if the compensation plan is craftily designed to hide that fact. It is, as they so often say, an “Enrollment Organization”, and no lawsuit will change that on its own merits.

There are other disputes in the offing for Apollo. The constant turmoil surrounding the company’s enrollment efforts, EEOC brouhaha, defrauding investors — they’re all part of a cycle of directed blindness designed with the intent of protecting the company’s assets. The result, instead, is the creation of an environment doomed to repeat past mistakes more gloriously in the future.

My daughter Sophie is currently enrolled in a Chinese language immersion school. She’s in kindergarten now and her teachers have started introducing the kids to simple oragami projects for crafts time. Then, in a sweet bit of synchronicity, her godfather received a book on some creative origami projects that you can make out of dollar bills for Christmas and brought it over for dinner a few weeks back. We were both schooled handily when we tried to make a Klingon Bird of Prey out of a greenback.

Today we stumbled on this feature in the Apple.com Science section, promoting the creative things you can do with a Mac. Robert Lang uses traditional materials — and his giant 30″ Cinema Display — to make some of the most incredible origami I’ve ever seen.It serves to remind me of two things. First, I’m really lousy at making small folds. I can serviceably fold letters into envelopes. I can fold cardboard into piles for recycling. And the extent of my ability to fold money ends at folding it in half, into my wallet. But what Lang can do with paper is the rough equivalent of folding space.He uses Mathematica to get it all done. He builds simulations that extrapolate the folds and show him how the finished piece will look based on the sim. And he does these things commercially.

Lang can design and fold some projects in an hour. More complicated patterns take months. “When I have a commercial job, of course,” he adds, “I work on it until the schedule says I have to deliver. I can guarantee that I can produce something in a couple of days that’s going to meet the needs and expectations of the client.”

This story gets to the heart of my mission as a storyteller: that people are motivated to buy through images evocative of use and success thanks to it. And Apple has built on this concept magnificently over the last five years, using the website to deliver some of the most compelling use tales in mass marketing computer marketing. What most companies deliver in the unapproachable white paper, Apple delivers through a sound investment in corporate media.What stories can your products and services tell?

Hello everyone. I’ve waited a LONG time to be able to make the following announcement: as of right now Nine Inch Nails is a totally free agent, free of any recording contract with any label. I have been under recording contracts for 18 years and have watched the business radically mutate from one thing to something inherently very different and it gives me great pleasure to be able to finally have a direct relationship with the audience as I see fit and appropriate. Look for some announcements in the near future regarding 2008. Exciting times, indeed.

Telegraph UK notes the Oasis and Jamiroquai are coming along too, which would be a perfectly right thing to do, since — huh? Jamiroquai? Where the hell has that guy been the last decade and a half?This is the next most beautiful extension of the user centered media market. The labels have created a firestorm of controversy around file sharing when the upshot is simply this: users want a relationship with their content creators. They want a personal and meaningful relationship, and a fiduciary one, too. They want to know that the content creators they follow are living off the fruits of their labors, that fans have contributed to the success of their favorite acts, authors, artists.Labels have become the electoral college of the consumer relationship. As we’re seeing in the political sphere, it just might turn out that the proxy vote doesn’t actually work as well as it used to, that the labels don’t actually know what I like and would spend my money to support, and that in fact, artists are served better by dealing directly with the populace.

The difference between the two, obviously, is in storage. The Classic model new comes in 80 GB, and a stunning 160 GB capacity, while the Touch comes in 8 and 16 GB. But, with digital music libraries swelling over the last five years, 160 GB is still chasing the tail of demand. Users have had to adapt their portable media consumption habits.

When the iPod was first launched, part of the beauty of the thing was that many people could, in fact, take their entire music collections with them. Now, they take playlists. They take one or two movies or TV shows. They take a few podcasts.

I have one 750 GB hard drive for my iTunes library alone. It’s just about full right now. That means, I’ll need 4.6 Classics, and 20 of the new Touch models to meet my needs. I don’t have a belt that big. Maybe a sash would be better.

Still, now that my habits have changed, I’ve realized that Apple has changed me yet again. They’ve made me realize that while I once needed to have my entire library, now I don’t. While I once needed to have 15 movies, now I don’t. They trained me once, and now they’ve trained me again.

Clearly, the Touch is the flagship product. It’s cool. It’s new. It’s sexy. It’s touch. And it boasts the iTunes WiFi Music Store. And now that Apple no longer reports iPod sales by version, we likely won’t know how successful the Classic will be, until it’s EOL’d.

Of course, the other Big news from today’s announcement: All of us who paid $599 for an iPhone got screwed. New price for the 8 GB model: $399. Here’s price skimming at it’s most blatant. While Apple usually waits 9 months to a year, plus at least one product revision, to settle pricing into a comfortable market dynamic, with the Rev 1 iPhone, they waited 90 days. This smarts on some level, but this is still the best phone I’ve ever used, and from the market reaction, it sounds like I’m not alone.

That’s my rationalization for the day, and I’m sticking to it.

Interestingly, this $200 cut sets an amazing new bar in the smartphone market. The iPhone is now on the low end of the smartphone market and it will be interesting to see how Nokia, Motorola, and (gawd) Palm respond. Two of the three of those companies might have the overall market weight to capitalize on scale to eek out a profit that feels all right. Palm? Not worth talking about right now. Microsoft makes the list — sort of — only because they slashed their own pricing of the Zune to $200 yesterday, in advance of the Apple announcement. Any other company would have canned the product line by now, but MS has patience and money. They have nothing that can compete with anything in the iPod line-up right now with no momentum behind them, but the holidays are coming. They did wonders with the XBox 360 — their other version two product.

Sort of parenthetically, there’s this new partnership with Starbucks to allow access to the iTunes store, and through it the Starbucks catalog, via WiFi for free in any Starbucks store. I love the idea. I’m completely numb to it right now, since it sounds like they’re going to take two years to roll it out to every store. Ho hum, indeed.

So, I shot off the first pic that came up — a scruffy-looking, vacationing Pete shot through a mirror in a get-away hacienda in New Mexico this year. Very vacation-chiq. Still, my face, my WIRED.

I think it’s a befitting example of the kind of personalization we’re capable of now, that even a publication the size of WIRED can reach out and touch us readers so personally, and it’s something all small businesses can take a note on: how many of us have 5,000 individual clients in our rosters? How long would it take to reach out and touch them each so personally?

I joined and was handed the contract. We’d spend a boatload with this agency specing out this contract that no one in the department really knew what to do with, so they passed it off to the only guy who had any skin in the game.

I had a huge problem with the arrangement, and I have the same problem now that it’s evolved and reared it’s head from Microsoft and Cisco. Valleywag has a good summary. Here’s a snitch:

Break

John Battelle’s ad network has roped in some of its star writers to an ad campaign on behalf of Microsoft’s “people-ready” catchphrase. In the ads, and the companion site built by Federated Media, Michael Arrington explains how his Techcrunch site became “people-ready“. “When is a business people ready?” asks Gigaom’s Om Malik. “The minute you decide to strike out on your own…” Other writers who’ve been paid to repeat Microsoft’s slogan include Paul Kedrosky and Matt Marshall of Venture Beat, as well as Fred Wilson, the blogger-investor.

The evolution is fairly obvious — in this case, these lassoed bloggers are shilling, and making it clear that they’re shilling, for an advertiser. On the surface, that should be the end of the discussion if you hang your hat on the “Truth in Advertising” mantra. Nick Chase tries to paint this issue with spit and polish in the Valleywag comment thread.

So the next step, naturally, is for marketers to want to join the conversation. It can be done in ethical, responsible ways, and FM’s authors are among the first to figure out how to do it.

Duh.

Then why do I still have such a problem with this mess? In my own situation, I tried to make this work. The first proposed change was to use our own stable of bloggers — current students of Axia college who might happen to have had blogs at the time. We couldn’t find enough of them, and the ones we did find couldn’t blog for beans.

Then we thought about having the agency stable of bloggers go back to school with Axia to legitimize their shill. Of course, they wanted to be paid hourly for their time in school, their time studying, their time writing papers, their time thinking about school, and so on.

As you can imagine, the whole pitch was suddenly loosing its luster. I cancelled the program.

I cancelled it because the methods did not meet the objectives of the program. The pitch was all about creating a discussion with our prospective students. But no matter how you spin it, there’s no way to create a legitimate, authentic discussion when that discussion starts from the voices of those who are not students, are not experienced, are not authentic.

Commenter Filament nails it far more eloquently than I ever did:

This is only “conversational” in the sense that a chat with Tony Snow about Bush’s record is a conversation: only technically. What you’re doing is creating the false appearance of conversation to make money.

This whole mess smacks of a key learning that so many companies are failing to learn. Companies formerly accustomed to building relationships through the brute force of advertising dollars don’t know how to translate their wares into anything more transparent than tin foil. You can’t blame Microsoft for giving it a shot. They’re not architected to know any better.

It’s harder, as with all things, to do it right. It’s harder to actually build an army of flag-waving maniacs sreaming from the rooftops about your organization. Leaders have to shake the trees, clear out old-media thinking and build the army the right way, from the beginning. Otherwise, you’re building a Potemkin Village, and your conversation is nothing more than vapor.

But there’s raw beauty in the iPhone campaign that comes from lessons learned over the last decade of Apple advertising. This is as unadulterated a product marketing mix as I’ve seen in the market in very long time, and the point it serves to prove is thus: EB White had it right — “Simplify, simplify, simplify.”

The “Switch” campaign was considered (mostly by me) to be a critical success and a business non-starter. But it was the first time that Apple attempted to tell their story transparently, and that was an important move. It taught them the power of the unadulterated user’s voice, the untarnished message. They were already making powerful, beautiful products. The “Switch” campaign sold the experience, sort of.

The iPod “Sillouhette” campaign drove the message further, selling the outcomes of the experience, linking the product to the feeling you get when you use it. It was beautiful and compelling and engaging, and sold the experience, sort of.

The iPhone capitalizes on everything the first two campaigns delivered so well, and drives the messaging completely naked. The broadcast advertising is nothing more than a screencast on using features of the product. Their print and outdoor focus on dates. Their 25 minute introduction to iPhone uses Young Steve Jobs to deliver transparent, real world use cases to demonstrate the device.

All this is to say one thing: tell your story. Rely less on agency steerage and paranoia and more on your own instinct. You’re the only one that knows your customer the way you know your customer. The closer you get to mirroring their experience in your messaging, the closer you’ll get to communicating your product or service to the unititiated.

Stick to the simple truth.