Not quite about Steve’s thoughts on flash….

His Gruberness writes:

Steve Jobs makes the case against Flash on iPhone OS. Cogent, detailed, straightforward, brutally honest. No prevarication. Read the whole thing

Only tangentally about Flash, but….

A long time ago, in a previous life, I was sitting in a conference room with a bunch of people — PR, marketing, legal, the usual suspects. We were hashing out ideas for creating new channels for marketing and how to get our message out into the public eye and seen.

At one point I spoke up and I said I knew how to create a marketing system that the entire universe would read. The room shut up, of course.

Let’s give Steve a blog

My argument was that if we created “Steve’s blog”, the entire universe would read it, and those that didn’t would get emails pointing them to whatever Steve said. The kind of visibility you can’t buy. Steve could post his laundry lists and people would fall over each other to be the first to analyze each word for hidden meaning. And when we had an important message we wanted to get out to the public unfiltered through journalists and the rest of the group that interprets what is said into what is read, we had a ready channel waiting and primed. it’d be a perfect place for product announcements and passing along added detail after keynotes — it had unbelievable opportunity. And heck, Steve could have also used it to promote charities (or pretty much anything) and made an impact in any number of ways.

They all stopped and thought about it for a bit; there was general consensus that it’d do all of that, that it could be a huge opinion mover — and unfiltered to boot. And nobody was willing to remotely consider taking it to Steve and pitching it to him, so it went nowhere. Myself included.

But I always felt it had massive potential. I think this not from Steve, if you look at it as an experiment in this direction (which I think it might be, and should be) is a massive proof of concept success. I am willing to bet the size of the audience that read Steve’s “blog post” (directly or indirectly) dwarfs the number that looked at Adobe’s response, which was ONLY in the Wall Street Journal.

It does raise one question to me. Does this indicate that Steve and Apple are figuring out how to use the online community to communicate instead of stonewall and fight with it? If so, that could get very interesting.

Steve with his own personal bully pulpit. Not something I’d want aimed at me, that’s for sure. But I know I’d read it.

Update: Charles Arthur (@charlesarthur) rightly points out that I’d talked about this before…

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