How Engadget's Online Presence Shocked The World

The power of a blog

Jun. 18th, 2007 by Shaun

Ok so this isn’t exactly new news but definatly something worth making a post on. So have you ever wondered what the most influential blog out there is? Well I think it’s safe to say that Engadget made one post that shook the world.

This post from Engadget gave Apple a bit of a taste of the power of a blog. Engadget created a post explaining that the iPhone and Leopard operating system launches would be delayed for a few months. This story was completely based on an internal e-mail that came from Apple and was fowarded to them. Within a few minutes of the post going live Apple’s stock dropped from $107.89 to $103.42 and demolished over $4 billion of the companies net worth in just a few minutes!

This one doesn’t bode well for Mac fans and the iPhone-hopeful: we have it on authority that as of today, the iPhone launch is being pushed back from June to… October (!), and Leopard is again seeing a delay, this time being pushed all the way back to January. Of 2008. The latest WWDC Leopard beta will still be handed out, but it looks like Apple-quality takes time, and we’re sure Jobs would remind everyone that it’s not always about “writing a check”, but just how much time are these two products really going to take?

Here is what Engadget had to say after they were notified that the e-mail was a hoax.

Here’s the story. A trustworthy source supplied us with an actual internal Apple email that went out to thousands of Apple employees earlier today (published after the break). The fact that this was an email sent within Apple’s internal email system to its employees is not in question. Let us reiterate: this was an ACTUAL email distributed within Apple’s internal email system to Apple employees.

When Engadget made the update Apple’s stock went back up a little bit however, Apple was left with the stinger of $1.25 billion in loses that day. All of this happened in 22 minuntes. Who knew a blog had this kind of power .