McGraw-Hill Cut From iPad Presentation Thanks To CEO's Big Mouth (Updated)
January 28, 2010
The one thing that every CEO in the world should know not to do is rain on Steve Jobs' parade, but McGraw-Hill CEO Terry McGraw apparently didn't get the memo. A single day before Apple's big iPad unveiling, McGraw-Hill's CEO told CNBC during a short interview that Apple would be unveiling a tablet computer running an iPhone OS and that it would be "terrific." Bad idea Mr. McGraw, bad idea.
Steve Jobs obviously took notice of this slip up and decided to take action by cutting McGraw-Hill from the presentation entirely. As you can see from the image above, the Simon & Schuster logo sits all alone in the very middle. According to VentureBeat, that sixth spot was reserved for McGraw-Hill, a rather large publisher compared to most of the others on the slide.
What remains to be seen is if Steve Jobs and company were just making a point by not including them during the presentation, or if they have been phased out entirely. You just never know with Steve.
Let this be another lesson to all companies and CEO's associated with unreleased Apple products, keep your mouth shut until Steve is done talking.
Update: According to AllThingsD, McGraw-Hill has denied that it was ever scheduled to be a part of the presentation and that the company didn't have any advanced knowledge of the iPad.
“As a company deeply involved in the digitization of education and business information, we were as interested as anyone in the launch of the new device, although we were never part of the launch event and never in a position to confirm details about the device ahead of time,” Steven Weiss, VP of Corporate Communications for The McGraw-Hill Companies said in a statement given to Digital Daily.I suppose it's possible Terry McGraw was just repeating rumors and speculation, so let's take a look at it one more time:
"Yeah, Very exciting. Yes, they’ll make their announcement tomorrow on this one. We have worked with Apple for quite a while. And the Tablet is going to be based on the iPhone operating system and so it will be transferable."What do you think? [Image via Gizmodo]