Trite is a fight
November 12, 2012 at 9:47 PM by Dr. Drang
I was drawn to Michael Lopp’s latest post by this Daring Fireball link. I don’t normally read Rands in Repose—the sociology and management of nerds holds no interest for me—but the quote Gruber posted was irresistible:
While I’d continued to hear about the disdain amongst the executive ranks about Forstall after I left Apple, I was still shocked about his departure, because while he was in no way Steve Jobs, he was the best approximation of Steve Jobs that Apple had left. You came to expect a certain amount of disruption around him because that’s how business was done at Apple - it was well-managed internal warfare. Innovation is not born out out of a committee; innovation is a fight. It’s messy, people die, but when the battle is over, something unimaginably significant has been achieved.
Could someone usually described as smart, insightful, and a good writer really be trotting out the old “business as war” metaphor? Oh, yes. He even upped the ante by saying people die in these wars.
But Lopp wasn’t just trite, he was remarkably tone deaf. The article was posted on November 11—Armistice Day, Veterans Day, Remembrance Day. Hardly the best day to be writing about people metaphorically dying in a squabble among multimillionaires. Even football coaches know enough to tone down the stupid battle rhetoric on November 11.
But not Michael Lopp. He decided to wear a poppy for Scott Forstall.
