candor
Tim Cook at All Things D when asked about Ping:
I was carefully avoiding that. We tried Ping, and I think the customer voted and said “This isn’t something that I want to put a lot of energy into.”
Will we kill it? I don’t know. We’ll look at that.
Sure Apple is tight-lipped about product announcements, but with how quickly copycats jump on anything they make, isn’t that perfectly sensible? The frankness with which their CEO can talk about failures like this is unprecedented in the tech community. Think about how RIM communicates about BlackBerry, Eric Schmidt’s crazy proclamations, or how any other company in the valley talks up products that don’t even exist yet. And yet Apple is so often presented by the press as harsh and uncommunicative.
I’m realizing more and more the gap between what the mainstream tech press presents and the reality of the industry. If you want to hear anything real about the state of technology you’d be better served by following a handful of select bloggers than picking up anything off the newsstand.