People ask me all the time, How do you do it with Walt Mossberg? Like today, he's supposed to be writing a review comparing the Treo 750 and the Samsung BlackJack. Instead it turns into a tribute to Apple. And he basically says, If I were you, I wouldn't buy either of these phones, I'd wait for the iPhone.
So how do we do it? No, we don't pay him. Walt takes himself very, very seriously and would never cop to a bribe. The solution for us has been a combination of hypnosis and flattery. Basically we bring him in, let him hang out with me, all very casual, and here's the key: I ask all the questions. I'm like, Dude, what do you think of this design? Where do you think the Internet is going? Bullshit stuff like that, but he waxes on and on, feeling all important because the Great Steve Jobs is asking for his advice. Beauty of it is that Walt is as dumb as a box of rocks. But he thinks he's like super-duper brilliant. (It's an affliction common to employees of the Wall Street Journal. Something about the water in the newsroom. "Ego juice," they call it, or so I've been told.) Sometimes we videotape old Walt going on and on, waving his arms and getting all worked up. We tell him we're taping so we can study his ideas later, but really it's just so we can laugh our asses off.
Anyway it works like a charm. Walt actually believes he's had a hand in creating most of our products. So of course he's not gonna dump on them. Oh, and then there's the hypnosis. While he's talking, I do a lot of work with my eyes, and then when I do get a few words in edgewise, I use a lot of NLP trigger words and send him under. He leaves here fully hypnotized and believing he's the true inventor of the iPod, the Nano, the Shuffle, the iPhone, whatever. One phone call every week to 10 days is all I need to refresh the hypnosis and keep him under.
I also got him to grow that crazy beard. Goat Boy, we call him. Or, sometimes, Goatberg. Photo above shows him right after his most recent brainwashing. I had him leaping onto chairs on all fours and making billy goat sounds. He doesn't remember any of it. Evil? I guess. But it's a heck of a lot of fun. Much love, Walt. Keep up the great work. Baaa-aaa-aaa. Baaa-aaa-aaa.
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Managing Mossberg
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7 comments:
ah, brilliant. way better than tshirts. yea! this is the (f)meat. yum.
So when the Feds come to you with the deal - and they will, don't doubt it for a second - when they come to you with the deal, will you do it?
When they slam the thick folder down on the table in the conference room and you gulp for a second at how thick it is, and the room seems to swim a bit, because you see that they had the phone tapped. And not just the office phone, but that *other* phone, the one that only three other people, one of whom works on the Isle of Man, has ...
Will you give them Larry?
Because that's who they really want.
They want them some fresh Ellison meat. All this garbage on the stock options at Apple is just a convenient toe-hold. Like a rock climber on the way up to the summit of Mt. Larry's ego.
Why would the Justice Department be all over you guys these days? Why have they dropped all the investigations into Microsoft and are treating it like good warm&fuzzy buddies?
Why are the pages of the Opensecrets.com full of campaign contributions made by Microsoft to congressmen ... hmmm... congressmen with oversight on the DOJ ... ?
What a co-inky-dink.
Somewhere Chairman Bill smiles as the cage of kittens is lowered into the water...
wordyeti:
now i understand.
No more BillyG.
It's Chairman Bill.
Doh.
i have no idea what the hell wordyeti is blathering on about. thick folders? fake steve would cave under seeing a thick folder??? dude, what are you smoking? must be some hellacious thai stick, let me tell you. because real or fake steve just reach into his pants and pull out his gigantic balls of brass, thud them onto that table and utterly crush whatever the doj thought it was packing.
but hey, back to the real subject matter - thanx for this, fsj. yeah, bitch slappin' the lonely goatherd mossberg. as they say in toon town, wotta maroon. excellent work.
now please, do something about nancy-boy pogue. god. talk about your greasy sycophants.
Your highness steve,
May I suggest that the slogan should go:
The Job's about Apple
not Apple about the Jobs.
Maybe its time that you stopped worrying about importing these gimmicky 'iphones' from Taiwan and concentrated on the core computer business. Wouldn't it be lovely if
you could persuade all the manufacturers to make their equipment compatible with OSX.
Who is going to carry around a Video ipod and an iphone; could you just not have introduced these features on your famous ipod and not go down the road of Wellington manufacturers like Nokia.
Walt Mossberg is the biggest ass in the media. He's the most self-important dick head in the media. Steve, he thinks that he's your Obi-Wan. Doesn't that bug the shit out of you?
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