Fake Steve Jobs gives an inspiring show at Web 2.0 Expo
Written on April 26, 2008 – 8:26 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
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When going to an enormous event as Web 2.0 Expo you know on beforehand that some keynotes and sessions are sponsored. So I wasn’t surprised when I saw company presentations of Yahoo, MySpace, Automattic and Dash. Yet what DID strike me was the quality of the non-sponsored parts of the program. Like O’Reilly’s passionate talk (more about that later) and the funny, witty and motivational speech of mr. Fake Steve Jobs himself, aka Dan Lyons. This Forbes journalist is a genuinely funny guy who managed to work an audience in a way that was rather impressive for that time of the day (really early).
Dan Lyons
Lyons presented as himself. For one time, he didn’t act like he was Steve Jobs. After making a couple of jokes to warm up the audience, he made a fool of people who tend to overreact when it comes to social media. “I just want to apologize in advance for the next 25 minutes, for the 25 minutes you’re never going to get back,” he said. “Please don’t Twitter attack me.”
Lyons started Fake Steve Jobs partly out of boredom - “Writing about guys like IBM all the time is … dull”. Yet he was also driven by fear - the media business was changing. Bloggers were winning ground on print media. So he started to join the other side: “I’m not old enough to retire”. He applied for Forbes online and was rejected.
“Please remember”, Lyons asked the audience, “Forbes said no. That’s very important”. Still Lyons couldn’t stop thinking about starting a blog. The idea of imitating a CEO first appeared in his mind when he noticed most CEO’s would act like they were writing a so-called transparent blog, yet all they did was spamming us with PR talk. Lyons: “What if somebody would go nuts?” That somebody turned out to be Steve Jobs, as “he takes himself too seriously and has no sense of humor. (..) When Jobs launched the iPhone he said Apple is changing the world. Come on, it’s a fucking cellphone.”
Fake Steve Jobs had the same attractive power on people as the real one, as Lyons built up a readership of 90,000 people in just six months. Moreover, people from all over the world started a man-hunt to track him down. The man leading the hunting masses: Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes. After another rejection from Forbes.com, Lyons sent Karlgaard a line - offering to write for Forbes. “He wrote back, ‘Oh, Fake Steve, you’re a genius, we’d love to hire you.” As Fake Steve Jobs, Lyons finally got his job at the online venue of Forbes.
The blog is a “life-changing” publication for Lyons. “I wake up excited every morning”. What he digs the most about his blog is that people actually build characters in the comments: “people with nicknames like Fake Vladimir Putin are performing on my blog”. According to Lyons, this kind of interaction is THE power of Web 2.0. A beautiful media future is lying ahead of us. We’ve built a strong foundation for the online dream, and it will get better “when the big media companies jump in”.
So all the funny remarks aside, Lyons did have a clear message. “Media business are focusing on the destruction of their business and therefore loose sight.” Since with the online revolution, the media experience becomes bigger, wider and richer. There are plenty of opportunities there. “We, the Web 2.0 attendees, are in the eye of the storm. No, we’re creating the storm”.
Lyons suddenly transformed a sharp and funny talk about his blog in an inspiring and motivating message to all the new media creators out there.
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
2 Responses to “Fake Steve Jobs gives an inspiring show at Web 2.0 Expo”
By BRAY on Apr 27, 2008 | Reply
The question in my mind is did Steve Jobs really write all that drivel about The iPhone changing the world?
More and more people are hiring others to write stuff for them. For example Thomas Power of Ecademy sometimes uses the services of David Petherick of the Edinburgh based company Claracada to blog for him.
Busy business owners must, of course, delegate tasks to others more able than themselves if their companies are to thrive. Did Richard Branson write ‘Losing My Virginity’? Come on, Branson is a self-confessed dyslexic. No doubt he supplied most of the information that went into it but I doubt he was the true author.
Recently I’ve been scouting around for business solutions for some of my students and readers. I looked at the material from a well-known American company selling customer contact and logistic solutions for SMEs. From their web site I downloaded an e-Book that when fired up in my Adobe Reader splurged an error message onto my screen saying that a certain font was unavailable. This was a pity because it was quite a good book.
I sent an e-mail to the company alerting them to the problem but instead of getting a reply I received a standard text from an auto-responder alerting me to the next stage of their sales process.
In psychology there is a concept known as ‘thin slicing’. According to Peter Marsden of New Scientist: “Thin-slicing is a neat cognitive trick that involves taking a narrow slice of data, just what you can capture in the blink of an eye, and letting your intuition do the work for you.”
My intuition told me not only that the software company didn’t write its e-Book, it also wasn’t as well integrated as the e-Book’s true author would have me believe. This was further confirmed when several pages of the Company Blog were coded in an obscure way. Here is an example:
“When others in the company walk into our room they don’t want to leave. In fact, we’re considering charging for people hanging out in our department!”
The same day I received a long e-mail signed by an International copywriter of some repute. Unfortunately I took the trouble to read its contents. Half way down the page the writer started to introduce and refer to himself in the third person!
Of course I knew all along that I was reading an auto-responder message, but I was prepared to remove my ‘reality specs’ and feel preened and cosseted by an e-mail from ‘the man’. In the event the post was clearly written by a sorcerer’s apprentice.
This is the problem with all these Web 1.0s, 2.0s and 3.0s. Even the best companies haven’t managed to wire in the basic etiquette of personal communication. When this happens I will become more excited.
BRAY