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Comment by huhtenberg | Hacker News Reader

You don't get it :)

Jobs calling a developer amounts to him gifting the dev a chance for a free and easy PR. And that's exactly what this person is doing - he tells everyone about the call and gets some eyes to look at his app. So effectively Jobs said "No, we won't let you work around our bug, but in exchange you can get a traffic bump for your app."

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Yes, to be honest, I didn't think of it from the "free traffic" perspective. But I wonder how important this actually is. Sure reddit / hn / slashdot crowd will happily check that kind of news, but are those services significant in any way in the number of applications bought? I don't see how a random user from the appstore target would find that post at all. But maybe I'm wrong here?

The marketing angle on this is great. It's not big exposure for apple, but it does completely illuminate a potentially larger conversation around API's. Steve is the one guy that could stop the conversation and having him make the 5min call changes the conversation for the issue, to how hands on Apple is with the development community.

Now, there is no way that Steve has time to deal with every problem, but things that have the potential for becoming bigger conversations I definitely see him stepping in quickly. He still reviews every.. EVERY single peace of advertising about the Apple brand and approves it personally...When it comes to brand, Steve is the most hands on CEO there is.

yes and because of the slashdot/hn/reddit traffic the site gets a large boost in inbound links which will up the site ranking thereby increasing search engine visibility. It could just be a total fabrication from the developer that jobs called him though and he might be saying it to get the traffic.

This also works for Jobs. By doing so, he keeps his executives on the hop, adds to his personal brand/legend, sends a clear message to those rumoring about his health status and to the developer base that has been complaining for some time.

I definitely said "this looks like an interesting app" to myself after first clicking and going to the page describing the app and then clicking the link to itunes and then waiting for itunes to load up.

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