AppleGate: The Day After
11:15 pm May 17th, 2007 by Sal Cangeloso
There has been some pretty interesting fallout from Engadget’s post yesterday about delays at Apple. The post sent Apple’s stock down about 4% (though it quickly rebounded and was up almost 2% today) and lot of bloggers and news organizations have caught wind of it. Even people that don’t follow the blogs, including financial types I have talked to, have been following the story closely not just because of the financial implications but because they are interested in the power of a single blog on such a closely watched stock.
Must read items:
- Engadget’s response
- Gizmodo’s take
- Techcrunch
From the Engadget post:
About an hour and 40 minutes after the initial memo went out, a second memo was sent to the same internal Apple lists, dismissing the first. Soon after, our source — who we’d been in contact with through the morning — let us know that Apple was dismissing this earlier email; the second memo passed off the first as “fake” and “not from Apple”. Fake indeed, but it still came from someone familiar with Apple’s internal mail systems, lists, memo composition structure, etc., who found a way to plant a phony memo in the inboxes of who knows how many Apple employees. (Both emails are published in the original post.) Why Apple took nearly two hours to respond to the situation we do not know.
Wow, this sounds like some hardcore industrial espionage action. Maybe the first email was a sting operation setup by Apple to find moles in their organization? Or maybe the Soviets got hold of Apple’s email server so they could send the email, buy stock during the drop and then make huge profits during the rebound?
Seriously though, if you have hot news you have to put it out fast otherwise someone else will get there first. The people at Engadget did their best to vet the story and it came from a source at Apple that was known to be legit. You can’t really ask for much more… right?
