Tech News

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Writer revealed

By Stevie Smith Aug 6, 2007, 16:45 GMT

A shadowy and satirical blog writer passing himself off as Apple Inc. chief executive Steve Jobs has finally been revealed this week. The blog in question, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, has gathered quite a following over the past twelve months by poking fun at everyone and anyone in the tech world from the supposed perspective of Steve Jobs.

The humorous tech-inspired blog has not in fact been penned by Jobs (though the Apple CEO, and a certain Bill Gates are apparently avid readers), but by Forbes Magazine senior editor Daniel Lyons, revealed The New York Times’ Brad Stone.

"Well, tip of the hat to you, Brad Stone... Now you've ruined the mystery of Fake Steve, robbing thousands of people around the world of their sense of childlike wonder," wrote an outed Lyons following Stone’s identity revelation and more than six months of widespread ‘who is Fake Steve’ investigation. "Hope you feel good about yourself, you mangina."

However, although Lyons has finally been unmasked as the long-standing Fake Steve Jobs, his popular Secret Diary blog will not be fading into insignificance any time soon, with Forbes.com preparing to integrate it directly into its pages. From a personal exposure point of view, Lyons will also be pulling the literary covers from "Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a Parody" this coming October, which is his new satirical novel.

Talking to The New York Times, Massachusetts-born Lyons (47) expressed his surprise at the amount of time it had taken to reveal him as the Fake Steve Jobs, especially as he had "not been that good at keeping it a secret."

Various possible culprits had been singled out and accused during the identity search (which was headed by California-based gossip blog Valleywag), including Wired magazine’s Leander Kahney, John Paczkowski of All Things Digital, and Andy Ihnatko of the Chicago Sun-Times.

Naturally, Apple’s Steve Jobs was at one point considered to be the actual author of the blog, which Lyons said he started as he thought it would be "funny if a CEO kept a blog that really told you what he thought." However, Jobs was eliminated from the running after he revealed himself to be a fan, applauding the blog’s content as being "pretty funny."

With a forthcoming literary publication sporting the same title as the popular online blog, Lyons was ultimately rumbled by his book deal after his agent presented the manuscript to publishers, citing the author as a published novelist and an established writer for a prominent publication. Brad Stone from the New York Times then perused possible matches before discovering similar posting styles in Floating Point, Lyons’ personal blog.

Beyond the cutting industry jibes of The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, Lyons has also written, and had published, a book of short stories called The Last Good Man, along with a novel called Dog Days.