Silicon Insider: 'Fake Steve Jobs' Is a Coward

Aug. 10, 2007 — -- You can call Steve Jobs a lot of things, but never a coward. Good or bad, success or failure, he puts himself out there in the public eye and takes his kudos and his shots.

By comparison, Fake Steve Jobs aka Dan Lyons is a coward. And what he has accomplished, again both good and bad, over the last year, tells us some important things about how the blogosphere has rewritten the rules of journalism.

If you aren't a Silicon Valleyite, or an Apple fanboy, you may have missed Fake Steve Jobs. It seemed to appear out of nowhere more than a year ago as a sort of pseudo-blog/diary written by Apple's Steve Jobs — with the added flip that it identified itself as not being by the real Jobs.

At its best, Fake Steve Jobs was an amusing take on what might be going on in the mind of the ever-elusive Mr. Jobs. Whether it actually captured Jobs' real personality, which for the most part I don't think it did, Fake Steve Jobs often brilliantly portrayed what everybody thinks is Jobs' interior life — or at least what it ought to be.

Thus, Fake Steve Jobs was alternately serene, petulant, cruel, vindictive and shrewdly insightful of the failings of others. He had a gift for portraying faux encounters with other high-tech mavens that gave us a pitiless analysis of those worthies as well.

He also had a talent for coming up with inspired nicknames for other tech biggies, i.e., "beastmaster" Bill Gates and "squirrel boy" Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Most entertaining of all was when Fake Steve Jobs turned on Apple's own customers, which he dismissed as "iTards."

While some readers have professed that Fake Steve Jobs was their favorite blog, I have to admit that I found it rather inconsistent and often tiresome. I caught onto the site pretty early on, read it for a few weeks then drifted away. After that I would dip in about once a month, scroll it for amusing nuggets (which were relatively far between) and move on. It increasingly struck me as a satire more appealing to people who had never met any of the individuals portrayed, but only knew of their reputations.

On the other hand, Jobs himself reportedly said he found Fake Steve Jobs pretty funny. So perhaps the portrayal was more accurate than we know.

While I was moving on, Fake Steve Jobs became increasingly popular among Third Generation Silicon Valley types. And for about the last six months, guessing the identity of the author of Fake Steve Jobs became the most popular Valley parlor game. Driving the search was Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes magazine, who used his column to speculate on the real FSJ.