Steve Jobs came within a song of going to the Moon ~ I, Cringely
Robert X.Cringely 10-3-12
... here’s the story of when I tried to get Steve and Apple to back my Moon Shot.
Longtime readers will remember that I’ve been trying since 2007 to mount a private unmanned mission to the Moon, though five years in it feels sometimes like I could have walked there by now. It turns out that the greatest challenge to reaching the moon isn’t technical but financial. Even though my Moon project is by far the cheapest one around, the trick is to raise money at a faster rate than the budget expansion that inevitably happens as you face realities along the way.
So I’ve had a lot of meetings, made a lot of presentations, and the project is far from dead. ...
Among my many meetings looking for sponsors were several with both Apple and Microsoft, neither of which resulted in a financial commitment but the stories tell a lot about each company.
At Microsoft I came in at too low a level. The people who got excited about the project had neither the budget for it nor ready access to someone with such a budget. We got lost in the general corporate noise, but before we did it was clear that Redmond bought our technical argument and saw a myriad of strategic and marketing reasons why it might be a good thing to do. Think Windows Phone on the Moon and you’ll get the idea.
And yet it didn’t happen.
Here’s why. It wasn’t some unconquered technical hurdle. It wasn’t that we couldn’t do what we said we could do (understand that we in this case meant a lot of real rocket scientists far smarter than me). It was that our mission animation lacked a musical score.
“It needs music,” said Steve.
-go to the link-
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