The story of the four Steves (Fossett, Jobs, Ballmer, and Colbert)

I've been dealing with a lot of "Steve"s in my life this past couple of weeks, and wanted to give you all a re-cap.

Steve Fossett - Stevie - He's a hell of an adventurer, and has been an inspiration for me. (Which, by the way, says a lot about his reputation.) Most recently he flew around the globe without refueling, alone in his plane (the Virgin Global Flyer). But as I stated in my earlier post, I've said my last about the search for Stevie.

Stephen Colbert - Codfish - Our interview was finally aired, and the truth is out. He was a slimy operator, but I got my revenge. Did you see how disrespectful he was?? What he thought was promotion of Virgin America was just boasting of the fact we named a plane after him. NOTHING of the amazing airline and all the cool stuff you can find on our planes! I'm a business warrior, and I used the best weapons I had at hand: a cold glass of water and public shame. (Plus, a S**T-ton of publicity around it, my personal favourite.)

Steve Jobs - So Jobs got annoyed last year when during one of my brainstorms I rang him up to chat about an iPod Class on our Virgin America airplanes. Of course, I had forgotten he was a raging a**hole who only cares about design and nothing about his customers. (F**king over the early iPhone adopters, anyone?)

So I got the phone with him, and immediately called my Virgin America design team. They had been planning on basing the in-flight computer system around Mac OS X. No more, and all because of that bloody idiot. The engineers said I couldn't use anything Windows because it could crash. And I said that Virgin planes don't crash, so we're not using Windows! Then they showed me this computer that had a penguin, and there was a big hit film about penguins recently, so I told them to go with that. And now I find out we're geek cool.

Once again, my business intuition is correct, and I'm staying away from raging a**holes like Steve Jobs.

Steve Ballmer - So I never told Steve Ballmer about using the penguin computers on Virgin America instead of his plane-crashing software. That guy can gets as dangerous as a drunken Scot, especially when he starts throwing all his weight around. Would you want to get into it with someone weighing 22 stone?? I didn't think so.

That said, he's a nice enough guy if he's been taking his medication. We occasionally exchange e-mails, and he said he'll take a flight with me on Virgin America or Virgin Atlantic sometime. Let's just say there's an obvious reason why. Not that he'll be able to do what I did at 19, especially at 22 stone.

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So those are the Steve's that I've been dealing with recently. Now it's back to the hammock to do some more strategic thinking and napping. I've got three new companies to start next week.

Warm regards,
Sir Dick