By Jonathan Crow

In my on-going commentary on EclipseCon 2008, today the opening keynote speaker is the Fake Steve Jobs (FSJ). Why, you should ask? Hmmm, hope to find the connection between him and Eclipse, but…

Daniel Lyons (aka the Fake Steve Jobs) also writes for Forbes about PC and Enterprise Computing.

How he started the blog. Looking at the blog you can see how messy it is, the antithesis of what Apple is all about. He didn’t plan it it sort of emerged and people started calling it “oh that’s the Fake Steve Jobs blog.” Showing drawing of Steve with a bong and Mac on his lap. Sent that to Forbes so that they could run it. They ran it without the bong, but still in the meditation pose. Outside of the Valley people just don’t get it. (Trying to explain it to my wife last night when I told her what I was doing the next day she had the same question).

Questions he will answer in the presentation:

Why

Why Steve Jobs

Why does it work

Why

Did you have a brain tumor, why did you start doing this? Everyone expected this crazy wild guy and got let down by a nerd in a tie. He wasn’t aware of it at the time, but after the fact he realized he was bored. Covering major companies was really easy. The other reason was fear. Print journalism is being disrupted. He preached to Sun about disruption from Linux and that Sun should embrace it. He realized his job was being disrupted in a similar fashion. Wrote an article for Forbes against blog. Then had an epiphany that they were a disruptive force and at least he should learn about them. He tried to go over to the internet side of Forbes but was shunned as a dinosaur. He started his own blog, played around with it. But who ever cares about the private blog of a news reporter. If it didn’t make it into your media article then why do I want to read about it. Jonathan Schwarz’s (Sun’s CEO) blog offered great opportunities for farce. What is Jonathan was really sitting at home at night just off the rails telling the naked truth.

Why Steve Jobs

He is a great fan of Apple, but the company is strange the fan boys are strange. They are a cult that makes products. Jobs has a lot of interests, a complex character. But the more he read about him the weirder he found them. The whole we are changing the world - come on you are making cell phone. A picture of how Steve sees himself (a picture of Jesus). Jobs thinks everyone loves him but doesn’t realize everyone hates him. FSJ started out to do comic strips, jokes. He told a few friends and it started spreading. After four to six weeks he shut it down, that was fun. People wrote in saying please turn it back on. Readers around the world started getting it. He now has an audience but no way to make money. Also as an anonymous blog there was this manhunt for who was the FSJ. His bosses bosses boss offered a reward to find out who was the FSJ. He wrote into Forbes to see if he could get a job (after being shunned) and was told that they bowed down to his genius.

Why does it work

It still boggles him that you can make something that is just fun for you and it works and can grow virally. The audience has been great - live and dynamic. People write and it can get incorporated the next day. Consume and create: people are feeding him links, movies, animations, photoshop, Disqus, PhotoCrank. It became a way for people to perform online. Doppleganger - showing how Larry Ellison and the evil character from Superman look alike.

What is on the blog

Fiction. Now he has an outlet for writing about Apple News, tech, politics, etc., as well as Microsoft. The tone is mostly gross and silly with occasional eruptions of seriousness. He thinks most of the people come back because of the seriousness, lending credibility to the humor.

Doesn’t see the Microsoft / Yahoo merger working. Taking the guys who finished second and third in a three-legged race and saying now they can run faster. Talking to the guys at Microsoft he found everyone dreading it. He was able to write stuff about the merger that was true, but funny (an arranged marriage) but couldn’t be printed in Forbes. A way to capture the news (and maybe the truth within the news) in funny ways.

So what does this have to do with Eclipse or even BPM (and hence this blog)? Well, honestly it doesn’t but it was a really funny break during the conference so I thought I would share the laughs. Tune it later for more serious sessions

March 18th, 2008