Ego Is a Product Decision

I had fifteen people in my PR agency. That was it. Fifteen people against agencies with three hundred, against in-house comms teams the size of small nations. And somehow, we kept getting called back.

Apple used to do this thing — bring in small, niche agencies for problems that didn't fit neatly into a retainer. Not the big campaigns. Not the product launches with the confetti and the keynote lighting. Those went to the big PR machines. We got the other stuff. The stuff that happened in a hallway or a hotel bar and had maybe six hours before it became a headline. My agency had a reputation for handling indiscretions. Personal problems that had metastasized into professional ones. You don't build that reputation by being loud. You build it by being the person in the room who says the least and notices the most.

Which is how I ended up, more than once, adjacent to the Adobe thing. Some of you won't know what I'm talking about; things before your time. Here's short summary:

The "Flash War" between Adobe and Apple was a prolonged conflict that took place primarily between 2007 and 2010 when Apple CEO Steve Jobs published his famous open letter, "Thoughts on Flash" officially barring Adobe Flash from all iOS devices and citing poor performance, security flaws, and battery drain. This led to a heated public "war of words" and ad campaigns between the two companies.

Nobody hired me to fix Adobe and Apple. Nobody could have. Some problems aren't PR problems. Some problems are just two people.

By the time I was doing work around Apple, the Flash war was already a known quantity — Steve Jobs had drawn his line, Adobe's CEO Shantanu Narayen had drawn his, and the thing had stopped being a disagreement and become a posture. Jobs wouldn't put Flash on iOS. Ever. He said it was about battery life, about security, about crashes, about not wanting a third party sitting between Apple and its own developers. All of that was true. None of it was the whole truth. The whole truth was that Jobs felt disrespected. He thought Narayen wouldn't take his calls over what he considered basic engineering problems. And when a man like that feels disrespected, you don't get a negotiation. You get an ego war.

This is far from the only example about an ego war that played out in corporate headlines. That's the thing about ego at that altitude — it doesn't stay contained in the boardroom. It leaks into the product roadmap. It leaks into press. It leaks into which browser your customer's mother uses to watch a video of her grandkids and can't, because the site was built in Flash and her iPad simply refuses to render it.

This wasn't sparring for sport. It was structural. Whole websites went dark on iOS devices — games, animations, entire front pages — because they'd been built on a format Apple had simply decided didn't exist for its users. Adobe tried to build a workaround, a compiler that let Flash developers package their work as native iPhone apps. Apple changed its developer agreement specifically to kill it. Adobe, for its part, wasn't just playing defense — at one point they reportedly pushed Apple to shut down Final Cut Pro, needling right back at a product Apple actually cared about. YouTube eventually just gave up on Flash altogether and rebuilt itself in HTML5, in no small part because Apple had made Flash unusable for a third of the internet's audience.

People built entire cottage industries — browser apps, players, wrappers — just to duct-tape two companies' egos back together so a customer could watch a video.

That's the part people miss when they tell this story as a tech anecdote. It wasn't tech. It was two founders who'd once been close — Jobs had been an early investor in Adobe, had personally talked its founders into building for the LaserWriter, had said watching that first page print out was one of the most magical things he'd ever seen — and something in that relationship soured long before it became public. By the time it was public, it wasn't a business dispute anymore. It was a grudge with a press strategy.

And here's where my job actually started.

Everyone thinks the job is understanding your own clients. It isn't, not primarily. The job is understanding their competition — not their product roadmap, not their quarterly numbers, not the sanitized quote their comms team hands to a reporter. You have to understand what the person running that competition wants, personally, apart from what's good for their shareholders. Because that's usually what's actually driving the decision.

Businesses like to believe (and claim) they're rational actors. They are not. They are collections of people, and people are emotional, and the more power a person has, the more expensive and obvious their emotions become to everyone around them.

I got good at reading that. Not because I was smarter than anyone else in the room, but because I had become an observer, a questioner from a young age (to my mother’s frustration). As a small agency, you end up doing the things nobody else has bandwidth for, which sounds like a burden and is actually the best training you could ask for about life in general.

You learn to read a press cycle the way you'd read a room at a dinner party gone slightly wrong — who's not making eye contact, who's overexplaining, who brought up a topic nobody asked about, why are they using that phrase? Sometimes it's noticing how someone walks the room, or reading an energy that seems misplaced. Why is someone constantly looking over there instead of at the person they're talking to? These are all ‘tells.’ None of that is in the transcript. But it's often the story behind the headline.

The Adobe-Apple thing taught me that no amount of message discipline fixes a wounded ego at the top of an org chart. You can control a narrative. You cannot control a grudge. And if you're advising anyone — a client, a company, yourself — without asking what's happening between the two people who actually run the thing, you're only ever managing the symptom. The disease is always personal. It was true in that hallway in Cupertino fifteen years ago, and it's true in every growing company I've ever touched since.

And it doesn't stop at tech. Once you start seeing it, you can't unsee it — the merger that falls apart for reasons the press release never mentions or spins into something that seems ‘off’, the partnership that goes cold overnight, the industry "standard" that never quite gets adopted because two people at the top can't stand each other. Contradictions say a lot about what's going on. Ego, grudges, personal history — they run more of what we see in business, in politics, in culture, than anyone with a title wants to admit. The official story is always the clean one. The real one is almost always about two people in a room who used to like each other, or never really did.