It's a sad farewell today to Fake Steve Jobs, which has been a consistently brilliant and all-too-diverting source of entertainment for the past two years, even after the New York Times cruelly exposed him as former Forbes journalist Dan Lyons.
Lyons is throwing in the towel because he's bored of the pretense, and though he tried introducing Fake Jerry Yang it just wasn't the same. He'll be starting a new blog under his real name and moving on to new and, we hope, even funnier things.
Greatest hits include:
Monkey Boy's three-legged race (Microsoft-Yahoo merger)
"It's like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they'll run faster.
"In the worst-case scenario the merger turns into a never-ending world of shit à la AOL and Time-Warner, and Microsoft ends up gutted and gasping and then they waste another few years debating whether they should break the two companies apart and if so how do they do that and then maybe some prick like Carl Icahn or Kirk Kerkorian jumps in and adds to the misery."
(That was from February, so predicting a intervention from Icahn was quite impressive...)
"Obviously we can't literally put our employees' lives at risk. But we have to make them feel that way. This requires a lot of psychological manipulation on our part. But look at the result. You think we could have made OS X so reliable if our engineers didn't believe in their hearts that every time a bug surfaced one man was going to be killed?"
The iPhone development process
"This can go on for months, with round after round of emergent designs, and it's all based on non-thinking, intuitive kind of interpretation, just an emotional reaction... Or sometimes the phone just doesn't look right in the advertisements, and so we have to redesign for that reason, too."
I've made a good discovery though: Lyons refers readers to two print versions of his site, one short form and one full monty, both made through blurb.com which converts blogs into books. Every cloud...
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