Jobs Has The Capacity To Make People Wacky

First of all, I like Apple. I spent the first eight years or so – from ’86 to 94’ – of my professional life developing Mac hardware, and then software. I used to bleed the Apple rainbow… when Apple’s logo was a rainbow.

I still like Apple’s products, but I think I have a more even handed view. I am not sure how, but I can actually see through the Steve Jobs reality distortion field. I have primarily written good things about Apple and Steve Jobs. I love the iPhone, and I think, while being a twit, that Steve Jobs is brilliant.

Now that said, I think the situation that I wrote about Friday, where Apple has outlawed multi-tasking on their phone for 3^rd party apps is insane. But that’s not the purpose of this post.

What I want to talk about is the power of Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field. On Friday I wrote about the multi-tasking issue. I referenced an article by Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch where he included the full 100 page document from Apple that contains the explanation of policy. The issue was also covered at Gizmodo.

And so it was fascinating to see the fanbois descend upon me like locusts, berating me for being so stupid that I could not understand what was “so obviously not true.” None of them bothered to read the actual document, and one of them actually provided a refutation to what seemed like an entirely different issue. I still don’t understand it.

It is the most irrationally emotional response I have gotten since I started blogging. And it brings me to the following conclusion. Jobs has the capacity to make people wacky. I don’t know if he is practicing some advanced form of Neural Linguistic Programming (NLP) or if it is some mentalist parlor trick, or perhaps even mass hypnosis.

But one thing is for sure. Steve Jobs is exceedingly powerful even in small doses. And while, generally, consumption should be considered safe, after watching a Jobs presentation, please wait two hours before driving.