On the contrary, I think your point is very relevant to the issue. One of the most relevant responses. I would like to point out that I'm not claiming that Steve Jobs never lied, or that he didn't use distraction-- a famous example being the claim that Apple was not working on an ereader[1] because "people don't read anymore". Many people think this is a lie , but I disagree. People don't read as much as they did in the past, and thus obviously if Apple were to do something in that space they'd have to do something other than replicating the traditional "reading" experience. You can call that a distraction... or you can claim he was wrong because you have stats that show people are reading more now than they ever have (of physical books) but at best you'd have him with wrong facts.
However, I do wish you'd been specific about what statements about FaceTime you consider to be a lie. Now I'm forced to guess. The only issue about FaceTime that I can guess would be controversial was the claim that the protocol was going to be made open or a standard, or that something might be open sourced. (I'm thinking it was the former.)
I don't think this was a lie, but an error. I suspect that this was probably Steve Jobs idea and a decision he made at the relatively last minute which turned out to be problematic either because FaceTime uses technology that Apple had licensed, and thus couldn't open source or a protocol that was licensed and thus Apple couldn't standardize. Or, it may be that they are in the process of doing this, possibly with some standards body, and are mired in bureaucracy?
I really don't know what happened (I don't even know the specifics of the alleged lie).... but in order for there to be a lie, I think there needs to be more than just saying something that is not correct.
There are lots of sources of error- misremembering, misunderstanding, misbelieving, or misspeaking. There needs to be an intent to deceive for it to be a lie, in my book.
This is a positive defense of Bill Gates too-- was he simply in error? Did he think that the Mac UI which did make it into OS X was the "real technology" and that the "kernel" of NeXTSTEP was the entire Cocoa frameworks? In that viewpoint you could say that what Bill Gates said is strictly true, though the result of that-- Isaacson thinking that the NeXT acquisition was a waste of money other than getting Jobs, is pretty deceptive.
Its possible Bill Gates is old and wasn't thinking clearly, or was deceiving himself,, or Isaacson is completely misrepresenting what he said.
[1] Note that to date, Apple has never released a Kindle competitor. It has released very different things, the iPhone and iPad. They do allow you to read books, of course, with iBooks, but Apple wasn't chasing the Kindle, and the question was whether Apple was going to compete with the kindle.
We don't know, because Apple never said another thing about FaceTime being submitted as an open protocol. Someone might even think they made the empty promise just so they wouldn't get flack about another proprietary chat service. But who knows... Apple should have addressed it one way or another.
Just as I suspected, this point is rationalized away with speculation. He said:
“And we’re going to take it all the way. We’re going to the standards bodies, starting tomorrow, and we’re going to make FaceTime an open industry standard.”
The reason this rings so hallow is because it is so outside the MO of Apple. If Apple creates something they think is really great (and customers do too) it becomes part of what sets Apple apart. Apple doesn't license their technology, they use it as a key differentiator. The only real contribution Apple has made, in my mind, to open standards is webkit; and they built that on top of KHTML so I'm not sure they really had a choice.
Yeah, I've heard that response and I guess I don't know how I feel about it still; I don't see what prevents him from keeping his assurances or I guess, why he wouldn't? I've seen others point out that "standards" got a lot of support as they were bashing Adobe. (Frankly I also think there probably would have been a good FaceTime implementation on Android and it would impact the uniqueness/Appleness of the feature). I guess I'm speculating, maybe inappropriately.
However, I do wish you'd been specific about what statements about FaceTime you consider to be a lie. Now I'm forced to guess. The only issue about FaceTime that I can guess would be controversial was the claim that the protocol was going to be made open or a standard, or that something might be open sourced. (I'm thinking it was the former.)
I don't think this was a lie, but an error. I suspect that this was probably Steve Jobs idea and a decision he made at the relatively last minute which turned out to be problematic either because FaceTime uses technology that Apple had licensed, and thus couldn't open source or a protocol that was licensed and thus Apple couldn't standardize. Or, it may be that they are in the process of doing this, possibly with some standards body, and are mired in bureaucracy?
I really don't know what happened (I don't even know the specifics of the alleged lie).... but in order for there to be a lie, I think there needs to be more than just saying something that is not correct.
There are lots of sources of error- misremembering, misunderstanding, misbelieving, or misspeaking. There needs to be an intent to deceive for it to be a lie, in my book.
This is a positive defense of Bill Gates too-- was he simply in error? Did he think that the Mac UI which did make it into OS X was the "real technology" and that the "kernel" of NeXTSTEP was the entire Cocoa frameworks? In that viewpoint you could say that what Bill Gates said is strictly true, though the result of that-- Isaacson thinking that the NeXT acquisition was a waste of money other than getting Jobs, is pretty deceptive.
Its possible Bill Gates is old and wasn't thinking clearly, or was deceiving himself,, or Isaacson is completely misrepresenting what he said.
[1] Note that to date, Apple has never released a Kindle competitor. It has released very different things, the iPhone and iPad. They do allow you to read books, of course, with iBooks, but Apple wasn't chasing the Kindle, and the question was whether Apple was going to compete with the kindle.