How Steve Jobs Wrote 'the Most Important Email in the History of Business' (inc.com) 88
A new column in Inc. argues that 14 years ago, Steve Jobs sent the most important email in the history of business — a one-sentence email to Bertrand Serlet, the company's senior vice president of Software Engineering, that's just recently been made public (through Apple's trial with Epic):
It reveals a conversation about the things Apple needs to be able to accomplish in order to allow third-party apps on the iPhone. Until that point, the iPhone only ran 16 apps pre-installed on every device. Jobs had famously said told developers that if they wanted to create apps for the iPhone, they could make web apps that ran in Safari... Except web apps aren't the same as native apps, and users immediately set about finding ways to jailbreak their devices in order to get apps on them.
Apple had really no choice but to find a way to make it possible to develop apps through some kind of official SDK. Serlet lays out a series of considerations about protecting users, creating a development platform, and ensuring that the APIs needed are sustainable and documented. The list only has 4 things, but the point Serlet is trying to make is that it is important to Apple to "do it right this time, rather than rush a half-cooked story with no real support."
Steve Jobs' reply was only one sentence long: "Sure, as long as we can roll it all out at Macworld on Jan 15, 2008."
That's it. That's the entire response.
Serlet's email is dated October 2, 2007. That means Jobs was giving him just over three months... Three months to do what the software engineer no doubt believed were critical steps if Apple was going to support apps on a platform that would eventually grow to over 1 billion devices worldwide and become one of the most valuable businesses of all time. As if that wasn't enough pressure, two weeks later, on October 17, Jobs publicly told developers that there would be an SDK available by February of 2008. It turns out it would actually be made available in March, and the App Store would launch later in July of that year.
At the time, Apple's market cap was around $150 billion. Today, it's more than $2 trillion, largely based on the success of the iPhone, which is based — at least in part — on the success of the App Store. For that reason alone, I think it's fair to say — in hindsight — that one-sentence reply has no doubt proven to be the most important email in the history of business.
Apple had really no choice but to find a way to make it possible to develop apps through some kind of official SDK. Serlet lays out a series of considerations about protecting users, creating a development platform, and ensuring that the APIs needed are sustainable and documented. The list only has 4 things, but the point Serlet is trying to make is that it is important to Apple to "do it right this time, rather than rush a half-cooked story with no real support."
Steve Jobs' reply was only one sentence long: "Sure, as long as we can roll it all out at Macworld on Jan 15, 2008."
That's it. That's the entire response.
Serlet's email is dated October 2, 2007. That means Jobs was giving him just over three months... Three months to do what the software engineer no doubt believed were critical steps if Apple was going to support apps on a platform that would eventually grow to over 1 billion devices worldwide and become one of the most valuable businesses of all time. As if that wasn't enough pressure, two weeks later, on October 17, Jobs publicly told developers that there would be an SDK available by February of 2008. It turns out it would actually be made available in March, and the App Store would launch later in July of that year.
At the time, Apple's market cap was around $150 billion. Today, it's more than $2 trillion, largely based on the success of the iPhone, which is based — at least in part — on the success of the App Store. For that reason alone, I think it's fair to say — in hindsight — that one-sentence reply has no doubt proven to be the most important email in the history of business.
Clickbait title (Score:4, Informative)
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They have about $320B in assets.
If you started selling the stock en masse the value would drop until they were valued somewhere between the value of their assets and their current stock value...
Re: Clickbait title (Score:2)
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They have about $320B in assets.
If you started selling the stock en masse the value would drop until they were valued somewhere between the value of their assets and their current stock value...
I think the whole "most important" moniker might be more than just assets. The ripple effect of creating an app store has pretty much shaped Apple computers, Apple and Android phones and devices, and to a lesser extent, Linux and Windows computing. Pretty much a game changer so complete that it shaped an entire ecosystem. Just my .02 cents.
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Linux had "App stores", aka package repositories, since the 90s. And Windows, well, they still don't have an App store that anybody bothers to use, at least the native one, there is of course Steam that predates this by a few years. I kind of fail to see what makes Apple special here, other than locking down their hardware so that all software sales have to go through them, though even that isn't new and has been done on consoles since the NES days, both in physical as well as online downloads. And than the
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Linux had "App stores", aka package repositories, since the 90s.
That's why I wrote somewhat. Using all three, I find the Linux repos to be quite useful, but not very similar. My only issue is that they tend to get behind with software that is updated often.
kind of fail to see what makes Apple special here, other than locking down their hardware so that all software sales have to go through them, though even that isn't new and has been done on consoles since the NES days, both in physical as well as online downloads.
We going through that old trope again? I can and have written some apps for iOS. Nothing locked down, although I don't do them through the App store. But it is simple enough for people to allow them to install and operate.
But that isn't even the point - Apple's store started a sea change. If you look at the Apple
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Lol. Blind hatred for some. Blind worship of a soulless corporation for others. It's all about balance
Explain your statement.
Re: Clickbait title (Score:2)
Lol. Blind hatred for some. Blind worship of a soulless corporation for others. It's all about balance
Explain your statement.
He never does. Because he obviously cannot.
He just makes these pronouncements and leaves.
I think he is about 12 years old.
Since he always gets downmodded into oblivion, he must be in the "Terrible" Karma-range by now.
Enjoy your 3 Posts-per-day limit, moron! (ACForever, not you!)...
Re: Clickbait title (Score:3)
Linux had "App stores", aka package repositories, since the 90s.
.
So what?
Tucows dates back to the mid 1980â(TM)s, Gopher (yes I know that is actually more just a search and indexing protocol) and CompServe (that definitely qualify) had software repositories further back than that.
Completely different things from the App Store concept created by Apple.
Need to revise headline... (Score:2)
Then we could apply Betteridge's Law.
Hundreds of things -- no, thousands-- contributed to Apple's current market status, and Apple is by no means the most important company in the history of business. This e-mail (basically a statement "yes, and we need to do it fast") was a trivial part.
Re:Clickbait title (Score:4, Insightful)
The question remains unanswered. (Score:5, Informative)
How did he do it? Did he use a keyboard? Did he type with his nose? Also as much as I like the modern world and it's convenient, the App Store is so far from the the most important development in the last 50 years that the premise is utterly laughable.
I mean the point that he didn't use a magical Apple technology to make this communication is probably an exemplar of that. It's arguably far more important to this story that someone at Apple once wrote on an internal memo "Yes, please install that "E-Mail" server."
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A curated software repository for the masses instead of the geeks. That's worth something right there.
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Personally, I would have preferred the ability to download and install applications from the Internet onto the device. I know that's not the "Apple" way of doing things, but Android lets you do that with .apk files.
Re: The question remains unanswered. (Score:3)
Hey what a great idea! Why hasnâ(TM)t anyone else had that idea? I mean what could possibly go wrong with millions of internet connected devices containing the most personal of information being open to anyoneâ(TM)s software?
Re: The question remains unanswered. (Score:2)
Personally, I would have preferred the ability to download and install applications from the Internet onto the device. I know that's not the "Apple" way of doing things, but Android lets you do that with .apk files.
Nice try, Troll.
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I didn't say it wasn't worth something. I said it's not the most important development in the last 50 years.
I mean shit I'm sure Job's sent an email telling his employees that Apple was getting into the mobile phone industry. That is orders of magnitude more significant, and likely still not the most important business email sent.
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That might be true I have no idea and neither does the author, because none of us have access to more than a tiny fraction of business emails over the years. Apple is worth a lot so they are extremely successful in business terms, but I would bet there have been other emails that have generated more money by kicking off entire industries.
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The article is claiming the Jobs' message is the most important email in the history of business.
And the premise is laughable, unless you consider that Jobs never sent an email internally about actually developing a Phone.
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Oh please. There's one referenced in the article itself.
The one to which Jobs replied.
Re:The question remains unanswered. (Score:5, Interesting)
It sounds dismissive. Doesn't seem to have understood what was being said. The outcome reflects that, initial versions of app support were quite limited and the APIs were poorly developed.
For example the early versions were targeting fixed resolution and DPI, which then locked Apple in to using exact multiples of the original iPhone screen resolution for years. No multitasking of course.
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Job's was making it extremely clear that he saw the deadline as so critical that it could not be sacrificed for these other concerns. I don't buy into the cult of jobs, but giving clear prioritisation is one of the more important things you can do as a leader. Wha
What the heck are you talking about? (Score:1)
The outcome reflects that, initial versions of app support were quite limited and the APIs were poorly developed.
I'm an IOS developer since slightly before the release of the App Store (I started writing apps using the decompiled API for jailbroken phones at first). I had an app in the app store at launch.
The initial version of the SDK were not all that limited. It's not like you couldn't access the camera, or other advanced device features through the app. In fact I was impressed the effort to make the
Re: The question remains unanswered. (Score:2)
No multitasking of course.
That's just ignorant.
IOS, f/k/a IPhoneOS, has multitasking; always has. Otherwise, you wouldnâ(TM)t be free to be on a phone call, then launch Safari or Message, f/k/a iMessage; or any other App, without dropping the call. Nor would you be able to listen to Music, f/k/a iTunes, while using Safari or any other App. Nor would your Timer/Alarm/Stopwatch run in the background while you watched YouTube videos, etc, etc, et CETERA!
Truth is, iOS, f/k/a iPhoneOS, has been a fully preemptive multitasking OS sin
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For all we know, he was sitting on the can when he wrote that reply.
Well, Rex Tillerson got the best news of his life while sitting on the can. Sounds like sitting on the can is conducive to good messaging which is why I continue to lobby for the US taxpayer buying Donald Trump a solid gold toilet-throne for the oval office when he gets re-instated as president and god-emperor of mankind.
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Used iShowboat
Most Important? (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, no.
That might be the most important email in the history of Apple, which it probably isn't either, but e.g. the Halloween Memo is dramatically more important to business, let alone computing.
And frankly, neither can be even close to the most important memo to business, which is a pretty goddamned broad category.
Re:Most Important? (Score:5, Interesting)
For memos, I'd argue that something like Toyota's Production System likely had a memo that was far more important.
For those who aren't in the know, Toyota couldn't compete with the US manufacturers in the post war period because they lacked the economy of scale. Instead, they implemented a JIT stocking system that has been since widely copied - keeping parts inventories down to lower costs. That was widely copied by other manufacturers to drive down costs.
Ironically, after the 2011 tsunami, Toyota reanalyzed the system. After the massive damage to parts of Japan, Toyota found that some parts had only a few manufacturers and a regional disaster could result in shortages. Which lead to Toyota keeping more inventory of crucial parts.
Less than a decade later, during the covid pandemic, while other manufacturers faced supply issues for computer components, Toyota was able to draw on that increased inventory and was able to continue manufacturing cars. While other manufacturers faced a shortage in computers, limiting production output.
Which goes to show that blindly copying a methodology without understanding it and looking for its faults is a bad thing.
(To be fair, another part of the problem was that US manufacturers calculated demand on the short-term drop in sales last year. While Toyota apparently relied on long-term trends.)
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Yeah, that's a great technical example of something that was more important.
Another example might be if there was correspondence involved with, say, the founding of any of the East India Companies. Or about establishing the triangle trade...
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I'm guessing you've seen Wendover Productions' excellent recent video [youtube.com] on this exact topic?
Re: Most Important? (Score:2)
Which goes to show that blindly copying a methodology without understanding it and looking for its faults is a bad thing.
"Lean Manufacturing" simply doesn't work in the U.S. The supply chains are too long.
Glad to see that even a company as committed to JustTooLate ERP, as is Toyota, found out that paying a little more to keep some raw materials on hand was actually a really smart idea, especially when the inevitable supply-chain SNAFU happens...
Spare us the hagiography (Score:1)
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Do you look at everything in "checkbox" fashion?
Yes, when the point is to determine who is responsible for what.
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What, are you still bitter you didn't have the money to waste on a Palm? Or an Apple Newton?
Apple Newton is the funniest of the pre-iphone mobile app platforms, to be sure.
But it was the Psion that I loved; it could run Perl.
Protip: Checkboxes are booleans. All booleans can be treated as checkboxes.
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We had mp3 players, too.
this smells like a (Score:5, Interesting)
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Right, like we didn't already know that shipping first was more important than technical correctness?
I mean, isn't that why Intel won with the 8086? They took a shortcut to 20 bit addressing?
And wasn't this already mainstream teaching in web consulting?
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>They took a shortcut to 20 bit addressing?
no, that's *not* why.
It's that they got IBM to use it for the PC.
Had IBM chosen the Z8000 (released months before the 8086) or the 68000 (released after the 8086, but long enough before the PC the it would have been usable for it, the 8086 would be a historical note like the Z8000 became. the 68k had 24 bit adressing, while the Z8000 was 23.
even at the time, iirc, the 8086 was intended as a terminal project, with another 16 bit to become intel's mainstream proc
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You don't know the full story, so you didn't understand what I said.
It doesn't imply I was wrong.
Stop trying to 'splain it to me, moron.
*vomit* (Score:1)
I suppose ... (Score:3)
The rest of us really don't care what Apple does in it's ivory tower where they revere the Henry Ford maxim of "any color as long as it's black". Apple has never been about user choices. It's been more about them determining what is right and locking everyone into it through semi-monopolistic practices. The above is a perfect example, Steve Jobs didn't want anyone writing apps for the iPhone, he wanted to control them. Now, with the app store, they still control and set the rules about what the user is allowed to run on a device they purchased. Just like they control what computer hardware a user can run any Apple desktop OS on.
Apple is, more than anything else, a marketing platform. They take ideas made elsewhere, pretty them up, and convince their users that somehow, by putting a shiny label on it, it's better than anything else and makes the user erroneously feel as if they are part of the elite.
Yes
So did Gateway, Dell, Google, and hundreds of other companies.
This is just another yawn-able fanboy story. Nothing to see here. Move along.
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For the minority of phone/computer users that use Apple it was important.
The rest of us really don't care what Apple does
Really? 3/8 of the last Slashdot stories you've commented on have "Apple" or "Steve Jobs" in the title. I'd say that indicates some level of caring.
While this story is certainly hyperbolic clickbait, I think it's undeniable that the launching of the app store (followed by Google Play, Amazon, Microsoft, etc., launching similar curated stores) is one of the biggest and most impactful moves of the last 15 years. Even someone like Stallman would agree with this. We've seen the biggest shift from full user cont
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Really? 3/8 of the last Slashdot stories you've commented on have "Apple" or "Steve Jobs" in the title. I'd say that indicates some level of caring.
Given the recent Apple trial, and how many comments those draw, why is that at all unusual? Really all it takes is replying to just a few posts in each of them.
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Given the recent Apple trial, and how many comments those draw, why is that at all unusual? Really all it takes is replying to just a few posts in each of them.
Who said it was unusual? The GP said, quote, "The rest of us really don't care what Apple does." The GP has chosen to post comments on 8 articles on Slashdot this year. Of those 8 articles, 3 of them are about Apple. It's not unusual, but it certainly shows that contrary to his protestations, the GP does indeed care about Apple.
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Apple is, more than anything else, a marketing platform. They take ideas made elsewhere, pretty them up, and convince their users that somehow, by putting a shiny label on it, it's better than anything else and makes the user erroneously feel as if they are part of the elite.
The homepod is a great example of this. Apple literally called it a breakthrough, and apple fans praised the shit out of it, when it was literally the most also-ran product of the decade. It also came with a permanent table staining feature free of charge. Apple TV is also slow as hell compared to basically ever other streaming box that exists, and also has the most limited app selection of all of the major ones, yet apple fans love that as well.
Bertrand Serlet's email is arguably more important (Score:5, Insightful)
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Visions are important. Support for that vision from higher ups is even more important for it to live.
Re:Bertrand Serlet's email is arguably more import (Score:5, Interesting)
Since it laid out the vision. But it is always more fashionable to give Jobs the credit.
Both are critical, though I'm a bit more curious about Jobs since he was one of the very small handful of CEOs who actually seem to have been able to drastically affect the prospects of a company, so his particular leadership style may in fact we worth studying.
His reply was interesting on a number of counts:
1) Super short and super clear.
2) It gave approval, though with a clear condition.
3) It emphasized the importance of that one condition.
4) It gave a HARD deadline, that turned out to be mostly achievable.
I don't know how many leaders would be comfortable setting out that important a decision with a 1-sentence email, I'm also not sure what you could have said with additional sentences.
Now, I don't know if the Jan 15th Macworld deadline was meaningful in the grand scheme of things but I can certainly imagine other leaders feeling the need to argue or at least discuss Serlet's list or create other sources of confusion and ambiguity surrounding the project.
Technical capability and vision matters, but good leadership is necessary to give that capability and vision an environment when it can thrive.
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Dismissive reply giving unrealistic deadline that resulted in poorly implemented and buggy release version ....
Lots of smart people (Score:2)
I think we should all applaud companies that have lots of smart people and have not outsourced their future to a 3rd party consulting company.
What they accomplished in such a short space of time was amazing.
Backwards HR departments = you will cause your company to collapse.
Just another unrealistic deadline (Score:2)
The most important email in history is... (Score:1)
I QUIT!!!
Corporate hell (Score:5, Insightful)
That email just proves something we already know and usually get bitten by - managers giving unrealistic deadlines disconnected from technical understanding of the topic.
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I’m also not sure if the invention of Apple’s walled garden and the 30% commission fee that came with it is something that should be celebrated.
Apple shareholders probably loved it, but a typical Slashdot user likes to download and install software themselves on their own devices.
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He did say IF, didn't he?
Yes, but look at what the IF was saying in context.
Serlet: do it right this time, rather than rush a half-cooked story...
Jobs: Sure, as long as we can roll it all out at Macworld on Jan 15, 2008.
Implication: The deadline was more important than doing it right.
Jobs was willing to accept a "half-cooked story" if it met the date. Time certainly indicates that the strategy worked. But Serlet didn't ask for a certain date, so maybe the date Jobs gave was totally within reason and Serlet met his quality goal. Or maybe Serlet and his team work extra uncompensated hours because they knew that if they sacrificed quality they would have a mess to support
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First you say deadlines are more important than doing it right, then you say that doing it right means meeting the deadline. Thinking only about deadlines is the mistake the OP was trying to point out in the email exchange.
A successful product requires the right product at the right time for a cost that provides ROI. Products are late most often because the company didn't commit resources in time, not because some engineer wanted too much quality in the product. Many products make the deadline, then fail
I'd say (Score:1)
Yeah, so? (Score:2)
In the context of the Epic trial, what does this have to do with anything? One could also argue that Epic could write games that run in Safari in order to bypass Apple's fees.
As far as the creation of an API in what appears to the outsider as a short period of time, erm, no. The API already existed because those 16 apps were written in it. What had to be done is document it in such a way that a non-Apple engineer could understand it (and not document features they don't want people messing with e.g. wifi
I can imagine one that's at least as important: (Score:2)
"We should probably go with Microsoft's operating system. I think they call it DOS...."
(sent and received by some people at IBM)
"important" (Score:1)
Because "important" = "obscene profits"
Possibly the most important email (Score:5, Insightful)
for Apple fanbois. Although even if you're an Apple lover, it's probably just an email.
Me, as a software developer and a quality engineer, I find the "you have 3 month to come up with some shit that will turn the company around" deplorable business practice. Glad it turned out okay for Apple, and kudos to whoever pulled it off - probably underpaid developers pulling allnighters at their managers' request - but it's hardly a praiseworthy email.
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Yeah, Bertrand had in his email stressed the importance of doing it right, not rushing it and not delivering a half-cooked solution.
In that context, Jobs reply reads like "Fuck you, just do it. Presenting it on Macworld in three months is more important than anything else".
They pulled it off, but I don't think it was thanks to Jobs.
Unfair competition (Score:2)
You can't compete with this because too many corporate emails are on a secure server somewhere and won't be made public.
There might have been some absolutely pivotal e-mail discussions at major companies that we just don't know about.
Bertrand Serlet wrote the importante email. (Score:2)
Jobs just decided not to be a moron.
Choosing not to be a moron is something 95% of people do every day.
Actually Ray Tomlinson did. (Score:2)
not even for Jobs (Score:3)
When Apple was running their "rip mix burn" ad campaign, one of the music industry execs was furious that it was encouraging people to "rip off" music. Jobs contacted him, describing what rip meant in the context of CDs. After that, he felt better, and permitted Apple's iTunes to sell their music. Without the iPod there never would have been an iPhone.
FTFY: Most emblamatic marketing manager email (Score:2)
14 years ago today ... (Score:2)
..So original in 2007 when he saw it 16 years before as a 3rd party application on NeXT .... and other systems had been using it for years ...
Atrociously bad submission (Score:2)
I have no idea what this is even about. And the submission doesn't help me to find out without going to the original article (which I am not motivated to do by it).
So Jobs allowed someone in Apple to do something, so long as he was fast enough? It's not only that I can't quite figure out what it was about. I also have no idea of whether this was supposedly successful or not.
I was actively following IT news at the time (just not particularly interested in Apple). So I am pretty sure I am not the only one wh
second to Elop's burning platform (Score:2)