An electronic gaffe at news outlet Bloomberg mistakenly sent an incomplete obituary for Apple CEO Steve Jobs over the wire on Wednesday afternoon in the US.
Steve Jobs
(Credit: CNET News)
The lengthy file, obtained by the Gawker blog, contained not only a preliminary obituary for the iconic Apple chief, but also a list of suggested contacts for a more extensive story: Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, and early Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki, among others.
The summary of Jobs' accomplishments, per the obituary, is that he "helped make personal computers as easy to use as telephones, changed the way animated films are made, persuaded consumers to tune into digital music, and re-fashioned the mobile phone".
It's not out of the ordinary at all that Bloomberg would have this written; all major news outlets have notable persons' obituaries prepared in advance so that only minor changes need be made at the actual time of death. That way, the news can be reported almost immediately and can be updated with further detail.
But a Jobs obituary, however premature, is more chilling than, say, a Bill Gates obituary. The Apple CEO successfully battled pancreatic cancer earlier this decade, and a magazine profile indicated that he had kept it secret for nine months while researching alternative treatments: a questionable move for any chief executive of a publicly traded company, but especially one as crucial to the runnings of the business as Jobs is.
When Jobs appeared onstage at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2008, his thin appearance led some bloggers and company critics to speculate that he was ill again, and some of them demanded that Apple reveal the state of the executive's health to shareholders.
Bloomberg released a retraction later on Wednesday that made only the vaguest of reference to the content of the gaffe. "An incomplete story referencing Apple was inadvertently published by Bloomberg News at 4:27 pm New York time today," the retraction read. "The item was never meant for publication and has been retracted."
