Former Apple Manager Calls Steve Jobs 'An Abusive Husband to an Entire Company'

Erin Caton, a former manager at Apple, has posted on Medium calling Steve Jobs a 'giant jerk' and blaming him for the failed launch of MobileMe.

In a post entitled, 'You are not Steve Jobs', Caton acknowledges that by writing this she will never work at Apple again. She then details her two personal experiences with Jobs.

First, she says Jobs cut in line ahead of her at the office cafeteria after just being hired.


I said to my co-worker, “Who is this douche?” as I had never seen an Apple keynote at that point. My co-worker whispered, “That’s STEVE.” Okay, I noted to myself, Steve is a bit of a dick.

Second, Caton reveals that she was an Engineering Project Manager for the revamp of .Mac to MobileMe. There were three to four levels of bosses between her and Steve Jobs.

We had been telling our bosses that we did not feel confident about our launch date for a long time. We gave any number of suggestions of what we could do to launch that wouldn’t be such a giant production, but would totally have worked.

Their suggestions were apparently ignored somewhere in the command line and Apple launched MobileMe with a bang.


Then it fell down launch night. And all the lovely troopers (because everyone who works at Apple is completely kick-ass and does the hell out of their jobs), worked literally around the clock to fix it. Sleeping under desks, shuttling from hotels nearby, tagging in the next coder for their shift, until it was back up.

At the time, Adam Lashinsky wrote that following the disastrous launch, Steve Jobs asked the MobileMe team what it was supposed to do. When someone answered, he said, "So why the fuck doesn't it do that?"

He continued to say, "You've tarnished Apple's reputation ... You should hate each other for having let each other down ... Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing good things about us."

On the spot, Jobs then named a new executive to run MobileMe.

Caton also describes that meeting:

Once it was up, we (at least a hundred of us) got called into a meeting with Steve Jobs. We all walked over to the building like we were headed to the guillotine. He stood in front of us and yelled at us, told us that we should be mad at each other, said we could have done a staggered launch and complained that we didn’t even try to do all the things that we (those on the ground floor of production that actually make the fucking products of the world) had been begging to do. It was the world’s best de-motivational speech.

While it's likely that Steve Jobs never heard their concerns, Caton blames the failed launch on Steve Jobs being a 'giant jerk' who was 'an abusive husband to an entire company' making his employees fear him to the point where they weren't brave enough to suggest a launch that wasn't Apple-like.

He made himself so fearful and terrible that an entire group of amazing, talented, hard working people, ended up getting screamed at wrongfully. It was his fault that the MobileMe launch went so poorly, not ours.

You can read an internal email from Steve Jobs to employees about the botched launch of MobileMe here or you can read Caton's full post at the link below.

Is Caton right? Or is this just the rant of an angry ex-employee. Let us know what you think in the comments...

Read More [via SAI]