The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote (2010)
sivers.org
sivers.org
> When I woke, I had furious emails and voicemails from my contact at Apple.
How was this unexpected? Who goes to a business meeting with a potential partner that can make your business soar, and then goes and blabs all over the internet about the partner's business strategy. Who does that shit?
He literally published Apple's perfected pitch and detailed strategy online the very next day:
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=66729&cid=6133882
Apple & CD Baby's partnership was ultimately very beneficial for both companies, but Derek certainly went a bit overboard publishing those meeting notes.
One who has thousands of people(and more who can be potential independent businesses(musicians/singers) on his portal) to communicate to in a short time and the other guy(business) who never mentioned[0] secrecy[1].
[0] Yes, you out to have done that. [1] Source: post.
I have mixed feeling about whether it was right for Steve to be vindictive, but I am certain I would be pissed.
Whether Apple felt otherwise is perhaps the point of his post. He thought their goals coincided with his, but it looks like they had other ideas.
Furthermore, it makes no sense to think Apple was pissed about the $40 since that happened after Apple got pissed.
You can see CDBaby's pricing here: http://members.cdbaby.com/cd-baby-cost.aspx
It looks like a very fair deal for small artists to me.
> Everything the guy did just screams amateur.
I disagree. At the very least, he is very smart. If you read those notes, it is clear that he has an incredible ability to distill and communicate what was important.
Agree. Default state in business normally "not ok to talk about this" unless specifically mentioned or there is some reason to believe that it is ok by other factors. Sometimes of course it's explicitly pointed out. Maybe someone simply forgot in the chain of command. Doesn't a meeting with Steve scream "better not talk about this"?
In the end it doesn't matter whether Apple is right or wrong anyway. It's the golden rule. He who has the gold rules. In this case assuming you want to be in business with Apple you need to go to extreme lengths to play the game the way they want it played.
After a series of emails with Steve Jobs --all while I was coding at four in the morning!-- my then partner and I flew to Cupertino for a meeting with VP's directly under him and about thirty engineers and managers from various areas of the organization. We brought with us nearly a million dollars of equipment to put on a good demonstration and illustrate our technology. Apple asked us to develop a product they needed. We threw a ton of money and effort at the task and got it done in three months (a redesign of an existing product). They started to promote the product, gave us a direct link on their website to ours. It was amazing.
Six months later a cheaper (20% of our price) bad quality product (among other things, there were reports of it catching fire) came into the scene. Apple dropped us like a hot potato. We lost a ton of time and money on the deal.
Am I angry? Nope. I have enough experience dealing with large companies to know you should go into these deals nearly expecting the worst corner cases. This, I think, is certainly true for small companies. Besides, I had a conversation with Steve Jobs at four in the morning. Perhaps that alone was worth the cost of admission...and I am not even close to being an Apple fan boy.
As for the OP, I don't think he was very wise in posting meeting info as he did.
Usually when people do get angry about these things it's because they don't have what you say next, in other words they haven't been around the block:
"I have enough experience"
More directly people get mad when you feel naive that you expected something and were fooled. In other words "I'm loyal to that girl and now she cheated on me". So you are mad at yourself for trusting and feeling fooled.
Sivers of course will most likely never make that type of mistake again. He has learned from the situation. If he does do the same thing though it will be with full knowledge of the possible outcome.
As a developer, I find myself saying that more often than I would like. Glad this isn't just a developer thing that Apple does - it seems like a consistent part of their DNA.
I thought it was a bit of schadenfreude or just happiness that developers weren't being singled out.
Poe's law is alive and well on HN, so I find it hard to spot sarcasm here unless it's fairly overt.
First of all, who posts meeting notes from meetings with top executives when given a heads up about upcoming products? NOBODY. Of course it's confidential by default.
Second, Apple was right to presume a company charging to get music in the App Store would likely provide lower quality music. Charging for access completely reverses the motivation of record companies. Until they were ready to open the floodgates, excluding companies that charged was a reasonable if rough quality filter.
It's not as though the people there didn't know that Derek represented a bunch of independents who would all be able to make their own decisions. And if they somehow did not know, then they're fools for not spending 5 minutes to understand how CD Baby worked and what it meant for Derek.
They could have said in less than three seconds "This is all confidential." And then Derek would have had a conversation with them about what he could and couldn't say. I don't think he was at all in the wrong to not assume confidentiality at the get go. People sharing information have a responsibility to set expectations on it's use. Not the people receiving it.
Of course, common sense is rarely common, which is why we have NDAs.
So what we've discovered is that context matters. The folks at Apple treated the negotiation with Derek the same as all the folks at the labels (where secrecy is probably the default and nothing needed to be said). Derek assumed that the people he was talking to understood the nature of his business (much, much different than a big music label) and would tell him if he needed to keep his trap shut. No such words were said and thus, he assumed everything was cool.
Was it potentially stupid of him to assume everything was cool? Yeah maybe. But at the same time, why is it his responsibility to think to ask if it's OK to share this information? How can he know there is any confidence to be breached?
I'm essentially arguing that this isn't such a clear-cut case as you make it out to be. Since context matters.
In another thread, we have links to the Debian project leader politely and directly talking to someone who is causing an issue for them, suggesting pathways for a relatively win-win resolution. He got labelled as treating the guy poorly.
Here we have Apple responding like a spoiled brat "What, how dare you do that! Take it down! Now we're going to do stuff without telling you, changing the bargain from our side, and make snide sideways remarks directed at you. We'll cut off communication and you have to guess at why we're doing this" and they get a pat on the head.
Very different expectations of behaviour given the amounts of money and risk involved.
That said, CDBaby were foolish to think divulging these details wouldn't effect their potential business arrangement.
Just about sums it all up, really.
While it's tempting to think that Jobs was pulling all the strings, the reality is that Apple is a large company where legal departments take forever, internal debate occur, and communication is slow.
It sucks that Jobs made that $40 statement without someone vetting (or caring) that they were negotiating with CDBaby and that's their price. It sucks that Apple did not communicate better about the reason for the delay. But doing enterprise deals is nothing like working with an individual, and in that context I wouldn't simply assume that Apple/Jobs was being spiteful.
If he didn't have those things nobody would pay attention to him or care about him other than the base level that anyone cares about anyone day to day. He knows that. Same as some pretty girls know why guys are interested in them. (Or rich guys hopefully know why girls are interested in them). It's a symbiotic relationship.
Business as usual until papers are fully signed and money in the bank.
It reminds me of a story of me when I got super excited about a contract with Zipcar, it was going great after meeting and email then silence. And 2 weeks later, got the call to end it all.
The lesson is to be humble/modest and don't get excited/lose focus when dealing with bigger cats- once the contract is signed AND money is transfered then maybe you can celebrate a bit.
The past year of my life has been spent dealing with a founder who assumes every compliment is a business deal ready to happen.
We've wasted so much time and money chasing after "paradigm shifts" and "game changers" that were literally nothing more than polite, small-talky blow offs.
There's a certain kind of narcissism at work in the minds of many founders. Perhaps it is what makes them successful on some level. Perhaps it is what motivates them to go forward. I dunno. Whatever it is, it is endlessly frustrating.
I notice that most of your comments show a level of hostility that's often disproportionate to the topic or comment you are responding to. You seem like a very angry person. It's not very pleasant.
"But we realize record companies do a great service. They edit! Did you know that if you and I record a song, for $40 we can pay a few of the services to get it on their site, through some intermediaries? We can be on Rhapsody and all these other guys for $40?"
Dude, what a pompous douchebag. You got a problem with what I did, tell me. Just don't screw around, sending mixed signals in a very roundabout way in the hope that I get it, because you're too scared of any confrontation in your Garden of Reality Distortion. I know Apple likes being this impenetrable Kremlin, but this is just plainly taking pages from Stalin's Guide to Management. "Did you know some CEO from a very successful tech company is a pompous douchebag?..."
I can see Apple not wanting to introduce a middle man.
>Then they showed the Apple software we'd all have to use to send them each album. It required us to put the audio CD into a Mac CD-Rom drive, type in all of the album info, song titles and bio, then click [encode] for it to rip, and [upload] when done.
>I raised my hand and asked if it was required that we use their software. They said yes.
>I asked again, saying we had over 100,000 albums, already ripped as lossless WAV files, with all of the info carefully entered by the artist themselves, ready to send to their servers with their exact specifications. They said sorry - you need to use this software - there is no other way.
>Ugh. That means we have to pull each one of those CDs off of the shelf again, stick it in a Mac, then cut-and-paste every song title into that Mac software. But so be it. If that's what Apple needs, OK.
Or perhaps disk images + AppleScript? I dunno if iTunes in those days supported ripping from an image.
Sign the deal, get cash up front, and then begin the drudgery of complying with Apple's byzantine requirements as a group.
> They said sorry - you need to use this software - there is no other way.
It would have been easy for Apple to work with entities such as CD Baby to whip up an alternate method to handle the importation of large catalogs of music. Once specified I'm sure such a trivial web API could be implemented and tested quickly.
But Apple and Jobs didn't do this because they knew they had the power to insist that their software be used even though it was only suited for single CD submissions.
I find it interesting that many commenters are critical of Sivers while completely overlooking Apple's abuse of power.
dmourati not only recognized the abuse of power but recommended a method for meeting it head on.
It'd be nice to see all that back catalog stuff available. I know I have a number of records that are good, but are not available digitally.
Something about this does not compute.
The only part here not news is Steve Jobs/Apple acting like jackasses--the particulars of the story are interesting.
The probably derived their "Don't be evil" from taking the reciprocal of what Steve Jobs "mentored" them.
Come on, "Don't be evil" is just clever marketing that a lot of people fell for at first, and some still do.
Which is it?
I don't think there is any rule on HN that says that all submitted stuff has to be new.
The only reason why I submitted it is that it was news to me.