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Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

His whole explantation seems to ignore the controversial part of his tweet: "Now there is nobody to say "no" to bad design."

He was clearly referring to "now" and indicates the design is bad.

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I'm one of the first to call bullshit anytime someone attributes a current Apple issue to the death of Steve Jobs. But to me the controversial part isn't the tweet, it's the firestorm of blog coverage that it generated. As far as I'm concerned this guy just post a quick mini rant as most people are wont to do on Twitter. Then out of nowhere a bunch of desperate bloggers latched on and dialed the sensationalism up to 11.

From the article:

Margolis adds that he no longer owns any Apple stock and hasn’t been employed by the company since 2008.

Having not worked there since 2008, he's not in the position to make that comment. It sounds like he was just venting or speculating, perhaps.

The point was that, in the clarification, he explains that each step of the Apple TV interface was a step forward, but the original tweet strongly suggests that he thinks the interface is worse now.

For me, the original tweet only suggests that he tried now to get some credit for something he did in 2007 an what was rejected. The bad thing is, what we see now is not what he did in 2007, he only did something "similar." The differences alone could be good enough reason for his work to get rejected, and he even himself now clarifies that the context is even more important.

If you look at his twitter feed, the controversial part was just part of a longer "twitter conversation" he was having with Aral Balkan about the new Apple TV UI design. He was criticizing parts of the design while actually defending other parts.

It's not like while Steve was alive, he stop less-than-stellar products from going out the door. Personally, I find the new Apple TV design to be much easier then before. Now, instead of playing "Guess the menu", I see where I want to go quickly and easily. Even the colors make it easy to see where it is at a glance. When I first saw it, and has been mentioned elsewhere, I was immediately struck by the question: Well, when are they going to release the AppleTV app for my iPad? Because that screen could be easily replicated to the iPad, and work perfectly.

It's very plausible that he really was referring to the present with that comment but its still pretty clear that everyone is reading way too far into it. It seems pretty reasonable to assume he was just making a flip remark without thinking of what would happen next. How could he? I know I wouldn't. How many regular (read: not famous) folks would think a quick tweet would ever get picked up like that even if they did work for the Apples of the world? I'm sure had there been reason to believe bloggers would jump on that one tweet he would've chosen his words more carefully. People like this guy tweet speculative stuff like that all day long and nothing comes of it most days so there was really no reason to expect it this time.

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