Honestly, kind of sad that Tim Cook’s reply was so generic. I don’t think I’m off base in saying this, and from personal experience, he is really not connected to the people at the company.
The experience as CEO of a company with 10e2-10e3 headcount is a lot different than the experience with 10e4-10e6 headcount.
But the latter can often afford a secretary, if not a team of secretaries, to handle these sorts of things, with permission to add his signature.
Personally I'd either say nothing or farm the research out to an assistant for long tenure employees.
Any number of negative employees would be troubling, but I admit 9.9 million of them would be especially bad.
That's actually his personality based on my knowledge of interactions with him. He is sort of a workaholic robot.
It would have been funnier if he replied with "Great idea, thank you."
There's no evidence that Steve Jobs knew Steve Hayman from Adam. "This was the only email I ever personally received from Steve Jobs."
Hayman did a lot of WWDC presentations of WebObjects which was the only thing really keeping NeXT alive prior to the merger. He mentions elsewhere that towards the end Jobs was mostly at Pixar and NeXT was reduced to selling $50,000 WebObjects licenses but also had its first profitable quarter.
A big part of me has suspected, especially after reading biographies about him, that Pixar was simply better aligned with his creative side. NeXT was a business, one he knew well, but Pixar made things with computing and I think that really appealed to Jobs.