I was disappointed with Monday's column "Apple vs. Palm: Geeks with grudges" and found Philip Elmer-DeWitt was the creator of the reality distortion field yesterday. Instead of updating his research he relied on his colleague Brent Schlender's article one and a half year earlier that wrote of the "long and complex relationships" between Apple and Fred Anderson of Elevation Partners and Jon Rubinstein.

For this writing I will leave aside discussing Fred Anderson though I am a admirer from his Apple days.

Schlender previously suggested Rubinstein being in disagreement with Steve Jobs ("not being on the same page with his boss" of 15 years) as per the convergence idea of the iPhone. Rubinstein was on record in an earlier Berliner Zeitung interview just before his Apple retirement that there would be no convergence of an iPod and a cellphone and they would remain specialized devices.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt continued in this speculation vein in yesterday's article by extending a possible patent or IP dispute to the suggestion of a personal grudge between individuals at Apple and Palm. This was in reference to efforts surrounding the development of the yet to be shipped Palm Pre smartphone.

He wrote: "At the unveiling of the Pre at the Consumer Electronics Show three weeks ago, Rubinstein introduced the device by first talking about how he retreated with his family to Mexico after he left Apple to lick his wounds — a surprisingly personal way to launch a new cellphone. (You can watch him here in the Palm-supplied video that shows us more of Rubinstein than we ever saw in his years at Apple.)"

Lick his wounds? Huh?

That did not sound like Jon Rubinstein and it is unfair to him to suggest it of him. Rubinstein has seen setbacks before (like many others in the Silicon Valley and the technology field) and even experienced a loss of a job at NeXT when they stopped making hardware years ago. Yet he still came back to work another time for Steve Jobs when he returned to Apple and he went on to engineer and contribute to some very successful shipping products that met with overwhelming success in the marketplace. His first effort at Palm with a product is notable and admirable though still unproven in the market place. (I will stick to my wonderful iPod Touch for now and suffer the same iPhone envy that Dennis Sellers suffers from.)

Philip Elmer-DeWitt could have done a search entry of "Jon Rubinstein Mexico" like I did just to see what Rubinstein was doing in Mexico between the period of his Apple retirement and Palm career to update his information before writing. I had not heard he was living there and was just curious myself.

My three second search came up with a very detailed story on Rubinstein and provided a direct quote on the "grudge" matter to show just how off base Elmer-DeWitt was when he went on to write his blog article.

Tekla S. Perry authored a very useful and informative piece on Rubinstein, the beautiful house he built in Mexico as well as a few snippets on the iPod development history not previously revealed before. The article is entitled "From Podfather to Palm's Pilot" for IEEE Spectrum Online dated September 2008.

The url for the article is http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/sep08/6592/1 and the information and quotes below are found at third page. You won't be disappointed to read the article in its entirety and we owe Tekla S. Perry our gratitude for the better reporting effort on Jon Rubinstein and the filling in of some historical moments surrounding the iPod development.

Perry's article reveals:

• Rubinstein gave Jobs 18 months' notice of exiting Apple just as he took up the helm of the iPod division.

• Rubinstein spent a year and a half working on the house he was building in Mexico while getting into a lot more exercise after stopping work at Apple.

• He received regular calls inviting him to serve on corporate boards but turned every single one of them down until meeting Palm's CEO.

• The conventional wisdom that he'd had a bitter falling-out with the Steve Jobs was confirmed to be not true.

The relevant direct quote from the article:

“I just wanted to take a break,” Rubinstein explains. “There was nothing negative about it. We announced [the resignation] to Wall Street six months before I left. I was not leaving because I was mad. I was just tired. I had worked with Steve for 16 years. He said that I deserved an award for that. We did some really great products together.”

Jobs, says Rubinstein, drove him to do things he wouldn't have done on his own. “And I added the discipline and execution that it takes to continue getting products out the door,” he says. “We did well together.”

So much for grudges.

For all these journalists and bloggers covering Apple and its products, they should note that not everything surrounding a former Apple employee and a move to another firm involves drama, conspiracy, mystery or a patent dispute.

My feelings for this incomplete kind of journalistic practice that misleads a reader was recently summed up best by Daniel Eran Dilger in his writing "Why Apple’s Tim Cook Did Not Threaten Palm Pre".

"To announce that Apple “hinted at plans” to sue Palm is simply disingenuous trolling. Even so, a variety of pundits have now started running with this idea as if it were established fact. This is why some bloggers and even web writers related to certain quasi-journalism sort-of-magazine brands are getting so difficult to take seriously anymore."

Well put.

While I appreciate some of Philip Elmer-DeWitt's earlier efforts to cover some angles of Apple related stories others pass on, especially some of the fantastic financial analysis that so called amateurs Deagol, Turley Muller and Andy Zaky have provided to the investor community at large, their track record on EPS estimates in comparison to the "professional" analysts in banks and stockbrokers and their extensive efforts of creating accurate Apple's earnings models, I could not let this article on so called grudges pass without comment.
I hope Philip and his colleague Schlender tone down the speculation, do more footwork and research and improve their accuracy in future articles concerning Apple related matters. They both have that responsibility given the circulation that Fortune and CNN have. I would like Elmer-DeWitt to correct the record will a follow-up article. If Jim Goldman can do it at CNBC and be a better reporter for it so can Philip Elmer-DeWitt at Fortune. I won't hold a grudge against either Elmer-DeWitt or Schlender but there will come a point when I treat them like any reporter using analysis or a quote from Enderle or Dvorak in their pieces.

How is that?

I won't bother to read them as they are totally discredited, have agendas or have some silly entertaining notion. The writer who does use them in their article is on my "suspect list" for the immediate future as not being intelligent enough to avoid them.

Finally, after benefitting from many of his efforts through products developed by teams of engineers at NeXT and Apple, I must congratulate Jon Rubinstein on constructing what looks like a beautiful house. It is never an easy task having done it once in the US and once in Australia. I can only imagine some of the troubles encountered in his effort in Mexico.

URLs links mentioned above:

"Apple vs. Palm: Geeks with grudges":
http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/01/26/apple-vs-palm-geeks-with...

"Why Apple’s Tim Cook Did Not Threaten Palm Pre":
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/01/23/why-apples-tim-cook-did-not-thr...

"From Podfather to Palm's Pilot": http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/sep08/6592/1

(Columnist Gaurang Donovan is an Australian “mystery man” who wishes to keep his identify secret for personal and business reasons—Dennis)