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Steve Jobs’s Obituary, Bill Gates and Heidi Roizen make news!

By Amarendra Bhushan for CEOWORLD Magazine Updated:August 29, 2008

steve jobs bill gates heidi Roizen

I am personally not a very big fan of Steve Jobs’s management skills. But this was way beyond. One more reason for Jobs to distrust the Media! Bloomberg News (financial news service) is expected to report facts, it was totally wrong. Why not say so? Mark Twain would put a creative spin on a mistake. Bloomberg News should state they made a mistake. Having a sense of humor or being well read has nothing to do with a news organization needing to admit they made a mistake. In an error that could have cost Apple investors millions of dollars! My god I am an investor too… The first rule of publishing is that anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

Bloomberg financial news service accidentally!! Published a 17-page obituary of Apple supremo CEO Steve Jobs. Media gossip blog Gawker.com has the full Steve Jobs obituary, recently updated. It is common media practice to keep obituaries of the famous on file even when they are healthy, so that the obituary can be published at a moment’s notice when the sad event occurs. Former UK music magazine Melody Maker famously had an obituary of Rolling Stone Keith Richards ready and frequently updated since the late 1960s.

The Associated Press has over 1,000 prepared obituaries in its files on a wide variety of public figures, including 26-year-old Britney Spears. The Los Angeles Times has 400. On hearing that his obituary had been published in the New York Journal author mark Twain commented “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”.

British folk/rock violinist Dave Swarbrick was killed off mistakenly by The Daily Telegraph in 1999 when they reported that his visit to hospital in Coventry had resulted in his death. On reading of his own death Swarbrick quipped: “It’s not the first time I have died in Coventry”. Steve Jobs has joined the likes of Alfred Nobel, Pope John Paul II, and Fidel Castro in the long list of celebrities whose obituaries have been published prematurely.

Steve Jobs obituary:

JOB, STEVE. APPLE FOUNDER, TECH VISIONARY. UPDATED AUGUST 2008

HOLD FOR RELEASE – DO NOT USE – HOLD FOR RELEASE – DO NOT USE

Steve Jobs’s birthday: Feb. 24, 1955
BIO UPDATED AS OF 2008, by Connie Guglielmo

APPLE PR CONTACTS: Katie Cotton — -redacted- and Steve Dowling: -redacted- or -redacted-

People to contact for comment:

- Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak: -redacted-
- Jon Rubinstein, former head of Apple’s iPod division. He’s now chairman at Palm. Contact Lynn Fox in PR.
- Heidi Roizen: venture capitalist who once dated Jobs: -redacted- or -redacted-. Heidi knows a lot of SiliconValley insiders and may put us in touch with others, including
- A.C. Mike Markkula, the first VC to back Apple.
- Larry Ellison of Oracle (one of his best friends); contact Deborah Hellinger in Oracle PR. -redacted-, -redacted-
- Jerry Brown (personal friend) and California AG. Try GARETH LACY at -redacted- IN OAKLAND; -redacted- CELL, -redacted- or press office: -redacted-
- Al Gore: member of Apple’s board of directors
- Bill Gates: Microsoft was among the first developers of Mac software
- Bob Iger at Disney: who bought Pixar from Jobs
- Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google and member of Apple’s board. Send note to -redacted- or try David Krane: -redacted- or -redacted-
- Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel Corp. (Apple began using Intel chips in its Macs in 2006). Contact Tom Beermann: -redacted- or
- Bill Calder on -redacted-. Both in Intel PR
- Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Contact Shawn Dainas in PR: -redacted-
- John Lassiter and Ed Catmull: Pixar-nee-Disney executives. Try Zenia Mucha, -redacted- or Jonathan Friedland, -redacted-, in corporate PR at Disney.
- Guy Kawasaki, one of the first Apple evangelists. -redacted- or -redacted-
- Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, who bought an early circuit board for the game Breakout from Jobs and Wozniak. (pr is being handled by his daughter, Alisa Bushnell. her cell is: -redacted-; work is -redacted- work/message;-redacted-)

Retraction:

Story Referencing Apple Was Sent in Error by Bloomberg News

Aug. 27 (Bloomberg) — An incomplete story referencing Apple
Inc. was inadvertently published by Bloomberg News at 4:27 p.m.
New York time today. The item was never meant for publication and
has been retracted.

—Editor: Joe Winski, Cesca Antonelli

Some laughed at the error that could have cost Apple investors millions of dollars, but it revived a serious question: How is Steve doing after his bout with pancreatic cancer? people started talking again about the CEO’s health in June, when a gaunt Jobs took the stage in San Francisco for the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. Whereas Apple officially has declined to talk about Jobs’ health. Anyway the story was marked “Hold for release – Do not use” and mistakenly sent to the news service’s thousands of clients.

This smells very fishy. Mistakes like this just don’t happen in publications like Bloomberg. This should be investigated by the FTC, SEC, and DOJ for securities fraud. But if you have a close look at people to contact list 2 names are making news here Bill Gates and ex-girlfriend Heidi Roizen, who once dated Jobs.

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