Retreating to Safety
Ten years ago, Apple’s Phil Schiller surprised Apple enthusiasts and developers by walking out on stage at John Gruber’s The Talk Show Live WWDC event and giving an open, human, honest interview to a somewhat jaded community.
Both Apple and Phil Schiller himself took a huge risk in doing this. That they agreed at all is a noteworthy gift to this community of long-time enthusiasts, many of whom have felt under-appreciated as the company has grown.
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Phil’s appearance on the show was warm, genuine, informative, and entertaining.
It was human.
And humanizing the company and its decisions, especially to developers — remember, developer relations is all under Phil — might be worth the PR risk.
This started a ten-year run of interviews by Apple executives on The Talk Show every year at WWDC that proved to be great, surprisingly safe PR for Apple.
No executive ever said something they shouldn’t have (they’re pros), no sensational or negative news stories ever resulted from them, and Apple’s enthusiastic fans and developers felt seen, heard, and appreciated.
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For unspecified reasons, Apple has declined to participate this year, ending what had become a beloved tradition in our community — and I can’t help but suspect that it won’t come back. (A lot has changed in the meantime.)
Maybe Apple has good reasons. Maybe not. We’ll see what their WWDC PR strategy looks like in a couple of weeks.
In the absence of any other information, it’s easy to assume that Apple no longer wants its executives to be interviewed in a human, unscripted, unedited context that may contain hard questions, and that Apple no longer feels it necessary to show their appreciation to our community and developers in this way.
I hope that’s either not the case, or it doesn’t stay the case for long.
This will be the first WWDC I’m not attending since 2009 (excluding the remote 2020 one, of course). Given my realizations about my relationship with Apple and how they view developers, I’ve decided that it’s best for me to take a break this year, gain some perspective, and decide what my future relationship should look like.
Maybe Apple’s leaders are doing that, too.