According to Digital Daily, McGraw-Hill strongly denied the iPad leak. They tried to defend the CEO Terry McGraw’s remarks to CNBC last Tuesday. The world renowned text-book publisher told that it was not privy to iPad prelaunch details and that to conclude otherwise is a misinterpretation of McGraw’s comments.
Could you remember the speech of Terry on CNBC? To remind you here’s the speech:
Yeah, Very exciting. Yes, they’ll make their announcement tomorrow on this one. We have worked with Apple for quite a while. And the Tablet is going to be based on the iPhone operating system and so it will be transferable. So what you are going to be able to do now is we have a consortium of e-books. And we have 95% of all our materials that are in e-book format. So now with the tablet you’re going to open up the higher education market, the professional market. The tablet is going to be just really terrific.
After that day, on the event day, Apple pointedly left them out of the presentation. Now McGraw-Hill is denying the leak of iPad OS before the prelaunch.
“As a company deeply involved in the digitization of education and business information, we were as interested as anyone in the launch of the new device, although we were never part of the launch event and never in a position to confirm details about the device ahead of time,” Steven Weiss, VP of Corporate Communications for The McGraw-Hill Companies said in a statement given to Digital Daily.
“On Tuesday afternoon Mr. McGraw appeared on CNBC in a wide ranging interview to discuss our earnings announcement and growth projections for 2010. His speculative comments about Apple’s pending launch, which he shared earlier in the day in a call with investors, were simply intended to suggest that if the new device were to use iPhone applications, many of our education products would be compatible with the technology and could be made easily available on it.”
Concluding, Weiss wrote, “Unfortunately, it seems that many mistakenly interpreted his comments as being more specific to yesterday’s announcement. It is also important to note that only the products of trade publishers were featured in the launch event. Our digital education programs are not in that category and were never part of those negotiations.”
Whatever McGraw intended to suggest, what he actually said was that there was a tablet, and that it was running the iPhone OS. And he was right! Which makes it a leak. And the idea that the CEO of a guaranteed major supplier of iPad content wouldn’t have known those details about the device in advance is beyond inconceivable.
Honestly, the fact that Terry McGraw mentioned something that everyone knew—or at least, strongly suspected—was going to happen isn’t going to affect the number of iPads Apple sells one bit.
Source: Digital Daily, Gizmodo
