The Jobsian force field, reversed
FORTUNE — Ben Bajarin’s “reality distortion” theory about why Wall Street doesn’t get Apple (AAPL) — first published in Time Magazine’s Techland last week — has been widely picked up by numerous Apple watchers (including this one). But nobody has had more fun with it than Daniel Eran Dilger, a regular (and relatively straightforward) contributor to AppleInsider who likes to let it fly on Roughly Drafted Magazine, his personal blog.
Bajarin’s theory was that the magic by which Steve Jobs could spin almost anything his way has been reversed; now the perception on the Street and in the media is that Apple — whose main problem, according to Bajarin, is that it can’t make smartphones and tablets fast enough to meet demand — is doomed.
Dilger has refined Bajarin’s theory and identified what he believes to be the source of the new distortive power. He calls it “flexibly adaptive logic.”
“Flawgic,” he writes, “is neither hardware nor software; it’s installed directly into public mindshare via a virus spread by talking heads.”
For example:
“If Apple were to release a cheap iPhone that cost $50 or a luxury one that cost $2000, it would receive intense scrutiny in either direction. The cheap version would be derided as flawed and worthless, while the expensive version would be laughed at for being ludicrously priced.
“Flawgic allows low end Android products to be hailed as volume sales generators, even if they are terrible products in every way. But it also does double-duty in allowing Google’s insanely priced devices, from Glass to Chromebook Pixel, to escape criticism of their inherently poor overall value or the likelihood of their ever selling in meaningful volumes.”
Flawgic is that powerful, he says.
Dilger really hits his stride when he talks about how the Flawgic gene was passed to Samsung, allowing it to argue with a straight face in federal court that it — not Apple — was the patent infringement victim.
“It’s like a rapist saying he had penetrated against his own will,” writes Dilger, “and please lock this woman up before she is allowed to have forcible sex with other innocent rapists. And can I sue her for damages? I think I hurt my penis.”
There’s more of the same at Google’s Android powered by remarkable new “flexibly adaptive logic”
