In his State of the Union address tonight, President Obama laid out a blueprint for economic recovery, with numerous references to the technology sector. “An economy built to last is one where we encourage the talent and ingenuity of every person in this country,” the President said, with Steve Jobs’ wife (and Instagram’s Mike Krieger) in attendance, That means women should earn equal pay for equal work. It means we should support everyone who’s willing to work; and every risk-taker and entrepreneur who aspires to become the next Steve Jobs.” → Read More
In a conversation with WIRED UK’s David Rowan on stage at the DLD Conference in Germany, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston acknowledged that he did in fact have a “great meeting” with the late Steve Jobs in 2009.
Houston said about the get-together that Jobs had heard of them and asked to meet with him. Even though he was generally gracious, Houston said, Jobs expressed that he felt Dropbox was more of a feature than a product or business and gave him a “bit of a hard time” about that. → Read More
While memorials of all kinds and sizes have been presented since his death, the world’s first statue of the late Steve Jobs has today been unveiled in Budapest, Hungary. It’s made completely of bronze and stands nearby the entrance of architectural software maker Graphisoft’s headquarters.
Jobs seems to be presenting a new product on stage, or possibly waving as he was known to do upon exiting the stage. → Read More
Love or hate him, there is no denying that Steve Jobs was a control freak. As Walter Isaacson’s magisterial biography of Jobs notes, Steve’s control freakery was so intense that he couldn’t stand sharing the stage while he was making one of his beloved whiteboard presentations. So what was the impact of this on Apple and how did it shape the company’s products and organization? → Read More
At the heart of the enigma of Steve Jobs lies a riddle about authority. On the one hand, Jobs was an intrinsically anti-authoritarian figure whose like was a litany of rebellions against every kind of convention. On the other hand, however, Jobs often seemed to run Apple like a personal fiefdom, shaping products and strategy according to his own whims and instincts. → Read More
At the beginning of his rich and very fair biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson notes that Steve himself “found the endeavor of assessing historic influence fascinating.” So when Isaacson came into the San Francisco TechCrunchTV studio earlier this week, I asked him for his personal assessment of Steve Jobs’ historic influence. Including Jobs in a pantheon of business icons such as Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and Walt Disney, his major contribution to history, Isaacson told me, lay in his ability to combine great artistry and great technology. But Jobs not only made history, Isaacson explained, he was also a reflection of it, channeling the Zen-like values of the counterculture into his products. → Read More
Who, exactly, was Steve Jobs? Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs has sparked an intriguing debate about the identity of the real Jobs. According to The New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell, Isaacson’s biography proved that Jobs was a “tweaker” – somebody who took other people’s ideas and perfected them. But Apple watchers like Daring Fireball’s John Gruber strongly disagreed, arguing that Jobs was anything but a tweaker and taking Isaacson to task for not telling us what Jobs “actually did” and who he was. → Read More
Move over, Tina Fey — Amazon has just released the list of their ten best-selling books of the year, and Walter Isaacson’s thoughtful biography of Steve Jobs has come out on top.
The biography’s appearance at the top of the list is a bit of a surprise considering its relatively late publication this year, but the book’s impressive sales performance was fueled by the huge show of fan support after the Apple co-founder’s untimely passing in October. → Read More
Like everyone else in the tech world, I’ve been reading Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography. Simultaneously, I’ve been reading the reactions to it. The one that seems to stand out above all others amounts to: “wow, Steve Jobs was a jerk”. Those who have followed Apple closely throughout the years have heard dozens if not hundreds of stories of Jobs berating employees. Isaacson’s book brings a handful of these stories to the masses, and it’s rubbing some people the wrong way.
Here’s the thing: the tech world could probably use more jerks.
I’ve been thinking about this since reading Robert Scoble’s post a couple days ago entitled “Why I’m treating startups more critically lately“. Depending on who you ask, Scoble is a lot of things. But I don’t think anyone would call Scoble a jerk. In fact, most would probably say he has the opposite problem. He tends to puff up startups into thinking they’re the best thing in the world. (A social network for your Roomba to take pictures of food? Brilliant! Game-changing!” — Okay, I exaggerate. Slightly.) That’s great. For five minutes. After that, reality often sets in. → Read More
I went down to the demonstration today, to get my fair share of bemusement. Occupy Wall Street seemed drizzly, dejected, and oddly disconnected from the world around it. I approve of their goals, and I think their message is very clear indeed, but I’m not so sure their methods are effective. We’ll see. But they did spur me to go back and reread, of all things, some Mark Cuban.
I don’t usually have much time for Cuban, but in a post last year he made a really interesting point: “Wall Street is a platform. It’s a platform to be exploited by every technological and intellectual means possible. The best analogy for traders? They are hackers. Just as hackers search for and exploit operating system and application shortcomings, traders do the same thing.” Matt Taibbi, in a recent Rolling Stone piece, is far more adversarial — “Wall Street Isn’t Really Winning, It’s Cheating” — but he makes essentially the same point. Most of the “cheats” he cites are examples of hacking the system, rather than breaking the law. (The big exception being the now-infamous Abacus case, but intelligent people have argued otherwise.)
It’s worth noting that the tech world’s attitude towards hacking the system, any system, generally ranges from “grudging respect” to “outright approval.” Steve Jobs was a phone phreak. MIT memorializes its finest hacks. Mark Zuckerberg’s famous FaceMash hack was the precursor to Facebook. → Read More
A few days ago, I wrote about the possibilities for Steve Jobs’ final “One more thing…” It seems pretty clear at this point that when he passed away earlier this month, he was still hard at work on a few new products for Apple. One was probably the next iPhone (meaning the one after the just-released iPhone 4S). Two other possibilities include digital textbooks and most notably, an Apple television set. All of this got me thinking.
Under Tim Cook and the rest of an extremely experienced and capable executive team, Apple is clearly in good hands going forward. Yes, Apple fell a bit short of Wall Street expectations last quarter, but they still destroyed their own, and next quarter promises to be a blowout. Further, all the talk of Apple’s internal university to instill the “Apple way” in employees even without Jobs is good news as well. But the truth is that Apple will not likely face their first true post-Jobs test until they release their first truly new product. That execution will shed light on Apple’s future. → Read More
China is serious about Jobs-mania. All 250,000 copies of the book are sold out in the country and folks lined up before bookstores opened just to get copy. Considering publishers already faked the bio, it’s clear that their love of Steve is still strong.
MICGadget has a full photo gallery of the launch including a number of delightful sculptures made entirely of copies of the bio.
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Like many of you I’ve been watching the steady stream of incremental Steve Jobs-related news stories for the past couple days, resulting from the imminent launch of Walter Issacson’s Jobs biography:
Jobs came up with the name Apple while on a fruitarian diet, he gave up Christianity at age 13, he loved King Lear, he was disappointed in President Obama, his first job was at Atari, he valued simplicity, utility and beauty, he hated Fox News, he was obsessed with Bob Dylan, he dated Joan Baez, he resisted early surgery for pancreatic cancer, he was inspired by a Cusinart food processer, he was inspired by a trip to a jelly bean factory, he advised Bill Clinton to tell the country about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, he thought John Mayer was “out of control,’ he even consulted a psychic. → Read More
Steve Jobs was the ultimate showman. As such, it should be no surprise that he realized the power of following up a great performance with an encore. But unlike many musicians who treat encores as a given add-on for each show, Jobs seemed to recognize that encores are much more powerful if they’re used judiciously. The Steve Jobs encore was the “One more thing…” He didn’t use it all the time, and because of that, when he did, it would whip the audience into a frenzy.
Following his passing, the question now turns to what Jobs was working on in his final days. Surely, the master showman has something to present us with even though he’s no longer around to show it off, right? After he stepped down as CEO in August, I made the case that his final “One more thing…” was actually Apple itself. That his last great product was actually a self-sustaining company that could continue to pump out innovation even after he’s gone. Hopefully that will be the case. But it’s sure starting to look like he may have had a few tangible “One last thing…” products up his sleeve as well. → Read More
As we were reporting the news about Dropbox’s $250 million funding round, Forbes went live with a fascinating story, detailing how co-founders Arash Ferdowsi and Drew Houston turned down a “nine-digit” acquisition offer from Apple back in late 2009 when the company was only two years old.
The late Steve Jobs, Apple’s iconic co-founder and former CEO, reportedly led the first (actually, only) meeting and apparently told Dropbox’s founders that they should sell because Apple would crush the company with a competing product – the recently debuted iCloud service. → Read More
As he was waiting first in line to buy the new iPhone 4S, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak said he is “a little afraid about the future of Apple” even though “it could go positive.” Some of his concerns are based on Apple’s iPhone 4S product demo. He says the company talked about its dual-core processor, but “Steve (Jobs) doesn’t want us to think about dual-core processors, all we need to know is how do we get our answer, how do we connect to the internet.”
In this video, shot with an iPhone, Woz also shared his reaction to the recent death of Steve Jobs and the last phone call they had together. Woz also talked about the Apple’s planned spaceship campus and its connection to Apple history.
Steve Jobs didn’t invent Twitter. In a week of relentless tributes, somehow that gives me some relief. Not that I buy the anti-Steve story, that we are imprisoned as artists in the closed architecture of the Apple walled garden. How soul-crushing it is to enjoy things for their beingness. Bah. → Read More
This is a guest post by Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk), Director of Product Management at Google.
I’m fairly certain Steve Jobs wouldn’t be satisfied hearing about how your IIe was the gateway to a life in programming. Or your retweet of “[].” Or your Facebook profile pic changing to a screenshot of the Apple.com memorial homepage. I never met the man but my sense is that memorializing him in only this fashion would be viewed as insufficient. After 56 years of thinking differently, our gift back to Steve Jobs cannot stop at viral videos. If the only lasting change to your life is your Twitter icon becoming a sad Mac you aren’t doing Steve Jobs justice.
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The Gillmor Gang — Doc Searls, Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — take the first tentative steps in the post-Jobs era. As a showman, technolgist, and business leader, he was unparalleled. But as a teacher, he gave us something even more valuable than ideas, products, and opportunity. Fired, he rebuilt. Dying, he lived even larger. Gone, he connected us to the power within ourselves. → Read More
When I wrote my piece entitled “One More Thing…” in August following the news that Steve Jobs was formally stepping down as CEO of Apple, I knew that sooner or later there would have to be a follow up. Unfortunately, it ended up being sooner.
While the reaction following Jobs’ resignation was powerful, the reaction to his passing has been nothing short of amazing. Former employees, colleagues, celebrities, adversaries — even the President of the United States paid tribute. But once again, the most fascinating group of people showing their support are the ones who did not know Steve Jobs. It’s the everyday people that simply used and loved his products. → Read More
