Apple for a few weeks was the most valued company in the world. A company approaching 400 billion in market cap has arrived. That is a navy like number. And, yet, Steve Jobs stayed a pirate through and through. His first and last products were both built for the consumer.
There are enterprise imitations of Facebook, but there are no enterprise imitations of the iPhone or the iPad. Steve Jobs create the iPhone and the iPad for the masses and those masses took over the corporate world on his behalf. If the CIOs of fatass companies were ever blindsided, it was by Steve Jobs.
I find that to be remarkable.
The life-work balance in the information age means you are the same person at work and elsewhere. You tap on the same iPhone at work as you do on vacation.
Image via WikipediaApple going after Samsung because, well, Samsung is also bringing smartphones and tablets into the market, is such hogwash. Henry Ford was not allowed to patent cars as a category. Steve Jobs himself was not allowed to patent the PC when it first came about.
The PC was/is a category. The smartphone is a category. The tablet is a category. Already Samsung smartphones are better than the Apple smartphone. If Samsung is merely copying why is it producing better devices?
There were digital music players before the iPod came along. But Steve Jobs might have laughed if he had been sued for bringing the iPod into the market.
Apple's envy is not the Samsung hardware. It is going after Android, the operating system, any which way it can.
Image via WikipediaIt is not exactly a departure. He will still be Chairperson. But then the Chairperson does not do day to day. He is leaving for health reasons, but he is also leaving at a time when the app looks like might be displaced by HTML5. So he gets to leave while still at the peak.
Steve Jobs' Power: As a technology journalist, I’ve often found Jobs utterly maddening. He’s controlling and manipulative. He doesn’t like the press, and, perhaps because of that, he has long had us under his big toe. (Criticize Apple too much and you and your colleagues can lose access to the company and its products.) His ethos has always been that he knows best, and that he, not you, should have maximum control of the products you buy. The ethos of software idealists has always been something of the opposite. ...... And yet, the man is undoubtedly a genius. He built Apple, was forced out, and then, in 1997, returned to resuscitate it. He invented the iPhone and the iPad. I’ve often thought of Apple as something like Singapore. It’s closed, restrictive, and authoritarian. And there’d deserve to be insurrection if things just didn’t work so damn well. ...... Steve Jobs built a cult of personality that gave him power...... Jobs had a power that Cook could not possibly have here, just because he was Jobs. He could summon anyone he wanted to meet with him; he could get journalists to write whatever he wanted them to write; and, if he and Apple threatened to screw you over, you had to believe them.
Searching For Steve Jobs: rarely spent more than ten minutes with a reporter ....... No Hollywood studio chief, no captain of industry, and probably no recent American politician, had a more visible impact on people’s lives. ..... I had just written a story about Google, and the folks at Apple clearly felt that they deserved as much publicity as some upstart search company run by two kids from Stanford. I had to agree...... They suggested that I tell the story of the Apple store. I told them that I had no interest in writing about real estate. They said they would get back to me. ....... the pattern never changed; Jobs turned out astounding new products like popcorn: new iMacs, then MacBooks, and eventually the iPhone and the iPad ....... Jobs’s 2007 introductory keynote for the iPhone was, to the digerati, the equivalent of the Grateful Dead’s 1977 Hartford performance, or Dylan at Newport. When Jobs explained that in order to navigate this mysterious new product, “I just take my finger, and I scroll,” it was at least as exciting to the geeks assembled in the Moscone Center as Lauren Bacall’s explanation to Humphrey Bogart that, to whistle, “Just put your lips together and blow.” (My editor at The New Yorker watched the announcement live on his office computer. Before Jobs was even done describing the new phone, he called me and said, “He had me at multi-touch, widescreen iPod.”) ....... By then I had given up on Steve Jobs as a profile subject. He just didn’t give a damn.
Apple: What Happens Now?: most C.E.O.s could be easily replaced, if not by your average Joe, then by your average executive vice-president. ..... created industries out of whole cloth. And Apple did this not by inventing products that had never been seen before—there were mp3 players before the iPod, smartphones before the iPhone, tablets before the iPad—but rather by making products that were so much better—superior design, more powerful, easier to use—that everyone wanted them....... he had no interest in listening to consumers—he was famously dismissive of market research—yet nonetheless had an amazing sense of what consumers actually wanted. ........ one of Jobs’s most important feats was building a deep management and design team—instead of centralizing power in his own hands, he gave a tremendous amount of responsibility to the executives who worked with him, including most obviously the designer Jonathan Ive and the operational whiz Tim Cook, who ran the company during Jobs’s previous medical leaves and who will now take over as C.E.O. Apple’s enormous profitability in recent years wasn’t just a function of coming up with great ideas. It was also a function of having an organization that was exceptionally good at turning those ideas into products, and doing so in an efficient and relentless manner. And that organization is not going to vanish now that Jobs has stepped down.
Apple After Steve Jobs: The news that Steve Jobs is stepping down as chief executive officer of Apple is rippling through the media, just as yesterday’s earthquake traveled up the East Coast. ....... Apple partisans explain their loyalty with rational arguments about elegant design and freedom from viruses, but their devotion runs as deep as sports fandom or religious faith, and they hang on Jobs’s every word....... Can Apple thrive without Jobs? It almost didn’t the first time around, and shares have plunged this evening......... journalists, bloggers, and fans have been parsing his every utterance, from W.W.D.C. keynotes to purported e-mails to members of the public, the way Moscow reporters used to watch the Kremlin. Apple is in much better financial shape than the Soviet Union was at the end, so I’m not counting on a period of glasnost, at least not yet........ I spend almost all of my waking hours looking at, listening to, touching, or carrying an Apple device, except when I am taking a shower or have been chided for neglecting the children. Sometimes, I’m using more than one at once, listening on my iPhone while reading on the iPad. ...... The iPad has been around for a little more than a year, and so far no other tablet has been able to establish itself as a viable alternative, and laptops and netbooks have lost their appeal. ..... its iCloud initiative suggests a further retreat from the open Web into a closed universe of apps ...... next wave of tablets anticipates the full flowering of HTML5, which will bring Web pages sophisticated enough to behave like apps. Jobs will not be the general leading the battle between apps and the Web, between open and closed systems, but he was the military strategist. And some of those who supported Apple for years will be hoping Jobs’s successors lose this campaign.
The Steve Jobs Sound: the most effective and influential music executive of the decade was Steve Jobs ...... Jobs knew that music fans, like other consumers, don’t hate paying for stuff: they—we—call that shopping, and we love it, so long as there’s something worth buying. ..... the iPod nano is now about the size of a postage stamp, with a touch screen, and it holds enough music to play for a week straight. (It can also do things many iPhones still can’t, like sync with multiple computers, or tune into terrestrial radio.) ...... under his watch, a company known for sleek design helped usher in an era of frothy pop maximalism.
The Wizard Of Apple: —the Mac, the mouse, the laptop, Pixar, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, iPad— ..... Jobs battled with Microsoft, and Silicon Valley companies, and music and publishing and Hollywood companies. He was disrupting their comfortable business models. Yet as irate as Bill Gates and others got with Jobs, they knew he set a standard they could not ignore. They scoffed at first when he said Apple would produce both software and hardware, and now they follow. They scoffed when he insisted on consumer friendly products that needed no elaborate instructions written as if by a committee of engineers, and now they try to follow. They scoffed when he opened Apple stores, noting that Disney and Sony and others had failed at this, and now they follow. They scoffed that he was impossible to partner with because he was dictatorial, and then they clamored to partner with Apple....... Steve Jobs could be arrogant and unpleasant, a brutal man a sane person would not want to work for. But the products he created will be his monuments. And so will the memory of how he created those products.
Steve Job's Lesson: The first wave of personal computing was one of the times Apple couldn’t completely control a commodity. P.C.s capitalized on Apple’s high price point, and the Apple operating system gave Microsoft the raw material to create the mass-market Windows OS. Those brutal lessons (and lawsuits) were burned permanently into Apple’s cultural memory; when it came time for a portable mp3 player, the iPod was designed and priced to be relatively accessible, and the constant vigilance of product upgrading gave the iPod and its many-sized children genuine market control. In the smartphone market, the iPhone has not been unseated by Google’s various Android devices, and the introduction of the iPhone 5 will likely bump the company back up into first place. The iPad is by far the most popular tablet, and nothing has come to market that even hints at challenger status. (Without serious competition, the iPad’s upward curve is more iPod than iPhone.) ...... But those are all things, and much of the future of computing will be about functionality: data clouds, subscription music services, a variety of mobile synchronicites. Apple’s new iOS 5 and iCloud service will take on much of this all at once, automatically copying your iTunes library into the cloud and offering a chunk of free storage (and then a very large chunk for a small yearly subscription fee). But Apple has barely any presence in the world of social media, which may be why Twitter is integrated into iOS 5, a rare collaboration between the notoriously proprietary Jobs and another company. Services like Spotify are tiny next to Apple’s terrifying market cap (which now outstrips the G.D.P. of many countries) but Apple can’t be lazy about any competition now. The company caught its second wind because of music—a thing Microsoft has never understood —and it is the iPod and iTunes that shot Apple upwards, before the smartphones and tablets lifted them up yet again...... iTunes is the world’s biggest music retailer, but people are increasingly happy to simply stream music over subscription services like MOG and Spotify—ownership is already an alien concept to younger listeners who use YouTube as their radio. So the iCloud may hoover up all of your goodies, but a chunk of the world has no goodies and sees no need for them. ..... Nobody is not paying attention—and that can’t be a bad way to leave the stage.
Image via WikipediaWhen Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace, that was hot property. And he looked like a genius when he paid $500 million for the service, and promptly got Google to pay him $900 million to run ads on the property. And that was the pinnacle. It was downhill after that for MySpace. Murdoch's corporate machine killed the whole operation with the usual jujitsu.
How you do it is you put a corporate guy on top of the whole thing, and that big shot starts thinking he is some kind of a big shot, he fires a few key people, he reorganizes a little bit. After all he has to cast the impression he is actually doing something. And that messes things up. There is no one in charge. The emphasis is no longer on innovation. It is on pleasing the corporate guy who, by the way, wants yet more ads shown on the property, because there are numbers to be met. They don't realize that might take away from the experience because they don't use MySpace in the first place, they just want to be the boss of it.
And now what do we have here? Cisco is flipping Flip. Flip was also hot when it got bought. That is why it got bought in the first place. Flip was supposed to be Cisco's own little iPod, that signature device that everyone but everyone carries and makes Cisco look cool.
Image via WikipediaIt could. It should. The idea of an operating system being the court clown is so pre-internet. The browser is the new court clown, it's not the operating system. The browser should have been the new operating system, and perhaps would have been if Microsoft had not killed Netscape.
I have watched in pain as Google has dragged its feet on the Chrome Operating System. Google is so obviously not a hardware company. Look at how they "released" their Chrome OS laptop. They released it like it were Gmail. They have released an early beta version to a limited number of users. I think they will give out a million of the machines for free. And based on the feedback they get, they will rework the machine. How lame!
Fortune: Apple's market cap tops $300 billion: Giving ExxonMobil a run for its money in the race to be the world's most valuable company ..... Apple has been the most valuable tech stock and the world's second most valuable publicly traded company -- after ExxonMobil (XOM) -- since it passed Microsoft (MSFT) last May.
It's astounding as to how far Steve Jobs has brought Apple in a dozen years or so. Apple could very well end up the world's most valuable company. That is just mind boggling.
The iPhone swept the scene. Before that it was the iPod. Wait, Steve first started with the Mac itself. Computers could actually be good looking. He did that. There was a Time or Newsweek cover I remember from years ago that said, iPod, therefore I am.
The iPad has created a whole new class in computing. And the Macbook Air has brought the price point to more achievable levels. The guy creates sleek.
Wow. This guy shows no signs of slowing down. This dude Steve Jobs, CEO of the past decade, dubbed the most remarkable comeback story in the history of business, Larry Ellison's best friend, is just warming up, it looks like.
"There are one or more strategic opportunities in the future," says he. You got to watch out for those. Word is already out he wants to take another crack at the netbook. He could also be thinking in terms of the natural user interface, 3D computing, and gesturing as opposed to touching. Gesturing is cleaner.
The name is so obvious, I am surprised I and others did not think it up soon enough. There were many other names floating. iTablet, iSlate, iBook. I was kind of thinking the name might be iSlate. But iPod, iPhone, iPad, the name just makes sense. P, P, P.
It is a new category. This is not a netbook. There is the PC - invented by Apple - there is the digital music player and the smartphone - both reinvented by Apple - there is the netbook - ignored by Apple - and now the tablet - reinvented by Apple. Microsoft toyed with the tablet idea a long time, but I guess they are not a hardware company.
Apple today is primarily a mobile company. The PC is more of a backdrop to them. Steve Jobs cracked Graphical Use Interface (GUI) before Bill Gates did. Now it is all about touch. I don't know if touch is the next big thing, but it is definitely a big, important addition to the computing experience ecosystem.
I keep thinking of the physically challenged. Some of these advances are good for them. But we need to do more. What would be an audio-only computing experience? You consume only audio, and you only give out voice commands. And you don't miss out on any website, not on any of the key applications like email. That would be great not just for the visually impaired, but also for those whole and on the move, like when you are driving. We already got touch for those who can't hear well.
What I have noticed most is the enormous amount of buzz around the official CEO of the Decade. Google is the company of the decade, and Jobs is the CEO of the Decade. There is a lot of sizzle.
A little over two hours ago I sent my executive summary and powerpoint presentation to Irene Hodes and Yao Huang for the Dot Com Hatchery event on January 13. This is what I sent. I hope to elaborate on the themes at this blog over the coming days leading up to the presentation. That is the social media way.
JyotiConnect Inc. Executive Summary by Paramendra Bhagat
JyotiConnect Inc.’s vision can be encapsulated in two letters: IC. IC, as in Internet Computer. The PC ended the mainframe era. The PC will not die. But the center of gravity in the computing industry is going to shift to the IC in a rich ecosystem of computing devices from smartphones, to netbooks, to PCs, to servers, to huge data farms. The IC will be the primary way the average human being will interact with the internet in a meaningful way.
The smartphones are all the rage today as they should be. And the mobile space will bring many more people their first web experience than the PC ever could have. That is exciting. But you can’t write a term paper on a smartphone. You need a device that speaks to the human dimensions for the screen and the keyboard. The hardware will look like a laptop of today but will be vastly different. Something much simpler, much cheaper, much lighter, much stronger.
There are three components to the IC vision: connectivity, hardware and software. My company would like to tackle it in that order. One and a half billion people are online today out of more than six billion. That is not good enough. Down the line we have to be able to offer wireless broadband supported by ads. But in the short term we have to be technology agnostic in how we bring people online.
You create few pilot projects, and once you have the basics down, you grow globally through the franchise concept. That way you tap into local capital, local ad markets, and locals’ awareness of the local political, social, cultural knowledge.
The hardware part could be a great second step. And you could argue everyone but everyone is already doing the IC software. Google is in the lead. Google today is the premier IC software company.
You want a barebones operating system that runs the browser, because all your computing needs are met online. If Web 2.0 has taught us anything, it is that the people, the masses are the very center of computing. Technology is secondary. And the web is poorer for every human being who is not yet online. The push for globally universal broadband, I am calling it Web 3.0. The semantic web is not it. That would be Web 2.1. (Competing For the Web 3.0 Definition)
I was done raising my round one goal of 100K and then in February 2009 most of my investors walked away reacting to the worst economy in 70 years. I took some time off, focused on social media, and now I am taking a second crack at my idea. This is the very first round, round 1, as I call it. I am looking for 100K.
Like Steve Jobs said years ago, the PC wars are over, Microsoft won, let’s move on to the next thing. And he gave us the iPod and the iPhone. I am saying the dot com wars have been won by Silicon Valley. If the center of gravity in tech is going to shift to NYC, it is not going to be because NYC finally outdid those on the West Coast in the dot com space. I don’t see that happening. But NYC is magically suited to take the lead on Web 3.0, as I define it. My company would like to take the lead. (Visionary Entrepreneurs Will Recreate The World)
Presentation
JyotiConnect Inc.
The IC as in Internet Computer Company
5 slides for 5 minutes
By Paramendra
Twitter.com/paramendra
Facebook.com/paramendra
LinkedIn.com/in/paramendra
paramendra@gmail.com Google “paramendra”
Slide 1: The Vision
o Mainframes ---> PCs ---> ICs
o Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0
o And the visionary.
o Me, the butterfly effect, and Nepal’s magical April Revolution 2006.
o I am extremely good at vision and group dynamics.
o Step 1: Raise and burn 100K. One full timer in NYC, a pilot project in Nepal, the poorest country outside of Africa.
o Step 2: Raise and burn 1-5 million. 5-10 full timers in NYC. 20-50 full timers in Nepal and Mumbai, Calcutta.
o Step 3: Grow like crazy globally through the franchise concept.
o I was done raising round 1 money and then most of my investors walked away in February 09. I let them. This is me taking a second crack at it. Ride the upswing. The future is now.
Slide 4: Round 1
o Looking to raise 100K.
o 15-20 K for the pilot project in Nepal.
o 25-30 K for a mobile, global team of part timers.
o 50 K for one full timer in NYC.
Slide 5: Web 3.0 and NYC
o Like Steve Jobs said years back, the PC wars are over, Microsoft won. Let’s move on. And he gave us the iPod and the iPhone.
o If the center of gravity in tech is going to shift to NYC, it will not be because we will produce the next big dot com. Silicon Valley won that round. Let’s move on to Web 3.0 as I define it. We will win. No place quite like NYC. (Empire State Of Mind)
Image by Earl - What I Saw 2.0 via Flickr"Why join the Navy . . . if you can be a pirate?"
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