Perhaps so. And only a few companies bought ads, which pissed off their customers (the ones that Apple is "fighting to protect") because of the repetition.

So Apple lowered the barrier. A failure to realize.

Not sure how this is a dispute of what I said, or somehow proves that iAd wasn't a failure, but a planned exit.

> And I don't think a former iAd exec has any reason to be doing PR for Apple when the purpose of that WSJ story and his cooperation with it was to pimp his new job/startup.

If you think that Apple (or any company of that size) doesn't have non-disparagement agreements with any corporate officer or down to SVP level, at the _very minimum_, you're mistaken.

Even those "we screwed up" articles you see are very carefully stage managed. They're (almost exclusively, save some very isolated high profile situations) scripted as a PR effort to manage customer satisfaction.