“Why does Mail have to be so fucking complicated?”
I always joked that I didn’t work with Steve; I worked near him. This anecdote falls into that category. In the early days of Mac OS X (now macOS), Mail was prominently featured in keynote addresses because it was a good showcase of the new operating system. The week before a keynote, they would do rehearsals, including demos.
As I mentioned in my article on the “iMail” concept, I was getting increasingly frustrated with the complexity of Mail around this time.
The week before the WWDC 2004 keynote, my manager told me that Steve threw a fit during the rehearsal of the Mail demo. He was frustrated and paced around saying [paraphrased]:
Why does Mail have to be so fucking complicated? You read email, you compose new messages, you send them. That’s it!
Steve Jobs, trying to use Mail.
I was thrilled to hear this anecdote. I didn’t feel like I had many allies in the management chain that shared my desire for a much simpler Mail. And now I had the ultimate ally. I took advantage of this and sent Steve an email the same day.
I barely had time to get back to work when I got a reply.



A few weeks later, I was in a brainstorming session with the Human Interface team and Scott Forstall was present. I was often quiet during these types of meetings because everyone would be frantically talking over one another such that I really couldn’t follow it. I was more the pondering, contemplative type.
This time around, though, Scott kept interrupting the flow, looking at me and smiling:
Why don’t we ask cricket what he thinks? cricket? You seem to know a lot about designing things, why haven’t we heard from you?
Scott Forstall, possibly passive-aggressively
That’s when it hit me. Steve had forwarded my email to him.
Months later, fate brought me to the Aperture team, so the story sadly ended there.
Big Oof!
Indeed!