Steve Jobs

Walter Isaacson, author of the Steve Jobs biography, said in the past he omitted certain details and even referred to the book as a “first or second draft” when discussing plans to expand it with an addendum in a future re-release of the best-selling bio. While we have heard nothing official on those plans since, Isaacson just published a lengthy piece for Harvard Business Review titled “The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs.”

As noted by Isaacson, he was inspired to write the piece after many attempted to draw management lessons from the biography that he claims, “fixate[s] too much on the rough edges” of Jobs’ personality. Most of the piece focuses on Jobs’ management style, but Isaacson also once again talked about the late chief’s desire to produce “magical tools for digital photography and ways to make television simple and personal.” Here is an excerpt:

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In a Financial Times story about Apple’s Senior Vice President of Industrial Design Jonathan Ive “emerging from [Steve] Jobs’ shadow,” we get a few interesting stories from ex-Apple employees regarding the design guru’s work ethic. While one anonymous ex-Apple employee told the publication Ive’s “main talent was his ability to manage his relationship with Jobs,” Path chief and former Apple employee Dave Morin remembers Ive as a perfectionist.

Morin described a story about Ive spending three months adjusting the MacBook design to ensure it could be easily operated with one finger:

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Here is one we are a bit dubious about because of the date: Variety Magazine says Twitter magnate Ashton Kutcher is signed on to play Steve Jobs in the upcoming biopic movie:

Ashton Kutcher is attached to play Steve Jobs in the indie pic “Jobs,” which Joshua Michael Stern (“Swing Vote”) will direct from a script by Matt Whiteley.

The film will chronicle Steve Jobs from wayward hippie to co-founder of Apple, where he became one of the most revered creative entrepreneurs of our time.

Joshua Michael Stern will direct, and production will start in May, according to Variety.

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If you are wondering why your recent trip to the Apple Store left you loving Apple more than ever or wanting your customers to feel the same way about your company, we got the book for you.

“The Apple Experience” by veteran Apple/technology author Carmine Gallo deep dives into the Apple retail experience and breaks down exactly what it is that Apple retail employees are trained to do just to make a customer feel good about an experience (and want to come back). The 235-page book goes through every aspect of employee training and pours through countless hours of interviews with employees and shoppers on Apple’s five-step service: Approach, Probe, Present, Listen, and End.

Even if you do not own a retail business and just want to understand how Apple retail works, there is a lot here for you.

Gallo heeds his own advice by delivering a fun and incredibly insightful book that will help people understand the “magic” of the Apple retail experience.

The Apple Experience is at Amazon. The hardcover is $16.50, and the Kindle version is $9.99. When it hits the iBookstore, it will be available here.

An “Apple Experience” excerpt from “Chapter 10: Sell the Benefit” is below:
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Apple’s Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has only held his title for 10 months, but he is already the world’s Highest-Rated CEO.

Careers community Glassdoor gave Cook a 97 percent rating in its “Top 25 Highest Rates CEOs” list for 2012. Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs only boasted 95 percent during his last year as chief executive.

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[vodpod id=Video.16288813&w=650&h=350&fv=]

The man in the interview above with RT is photographer Doug Menuez. He spent three years capturing Steve Jobs after the legendary chief executive officer was forced out of Apple in 1985 and began work at NeXT computer. In the interview, Menuez gave first-hand accounts of how Jobs worked with engineers and his team at NeXT, and he spent an almost four-year period photographing Jobs and the company. Menuez did not keep in contact with Jobs following those years, but thousands of his pictures currently reside in Stanford’s Apple Collection archives.

Menuez told RT how the project to photograph Jobs initially began:

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This is not the first time we have received hints that Apple is working on an innovative universal remote control for controlling TV and video content. In January, we told you that Apple was researching a touchscreen remote with adaptable user interfaces. The invention would essentially allow button layouts stored in the cloud or in a device (such as a TV) to be wirelessly and seamlessly beamed to the controller’s UI. The concept would alleviate the “table full of remotes” scenario Steve Jobs described at D8.

Today, a new patent application published by the United States Patent & Trademark Office and detailed by PatentlyApple gives us even more insight into what Apple’s universal remote concept could become. In the newly discovered patent application, Apple details a remote that is capable of displaying customized controls for various devices by simply taking a picture of the device. Apple would send the picture to iCloud, analyze it, and beam a UI or button layout to the remote that works for your TV. PatentlyApple explained:

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE-D2RtagHU]

This is an interesting little paragraph from Wired’s profile of Linus Torvalds, the founder of Open Source Linux OS:

Torvalds has never met Bill Gates, but around 2000, when he was still working at Transmeta, he met Steve Jobs. Jobs invited him to Apple’s Cupertino campus and tried to hire him. “Unix for the biggest user base: that was the pitch,” says Torvalds. The condition: He’d have to drop Linux development. “He wanted me to work at Apple doing non-Linux things,” he said. That was a non-starter for Torvalds. Besides, he hated Mac OS’s Mach kernel.

Linux is now the core of many operating systems, such as Android, Chrome WebOS, and a few others. If Apple hired Torvalds in 2000, Linux might not have made it to 2012.

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Late last year, the New York Times did a great interactive feature on the 323 Patents that Steve Jobs was granted as CEO of Apple.

From Patently Apple today:

Today, the US Patent and Trademark Office granted Apple a design patent for their flagship Shanghai Apple Store which opened its doors in September 2010. One of the designers credited for this incredible architecture is the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

He keeps racking them up…
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iUvuaChDEg]

According to Above the Law, the original iPhone jailbreaker, Geohot, was arrested for felony possession of marijuana while at an international border crossing on his way to SXSW. According to the report, the arresting border patrol officers may have been outside of their jurisdiction (and likely measured improperly).

[tweet https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/180262261535940610]

Before you rush to judge the guy, remember Steve Jobs’ thoughts on mind-altering substances (and phone hacking). If you have jailbroken using any of the “xxxRain” jailbreaking tools, you have used Geohot’s work. He also recently worked at both Google and Facebook (and Lady Gaga’s BackPlane).

He was still able to give his talk at SXSW, which is a pretty interesting (mp3). The full description is below:

According to an Apple filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission today, Tim Cook sold 20,178 shares of his company’s stock in a series of transactions over the past two business days. The sales started at $547 per share and climbed to $551 before the last transaction, which left Apple’s Chief Executive Officer with $11.1 million.

Cook, who earns a bit more than $1 a year in Apple salary, was awarded 1 million shares of Apple last year, which vest in 2016 and 2021. Those shares are now worth over half a billion dollars.

Apple is the world’s most valuable company with stock valued at $552 upon today’s closing bell and continued to climb in after-hours trading.

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In a rare Q&A with the Evening Standard‘s Mark Prigg from the firm’s headquarters, Apple’s design guru talks about Apple’s design process and of course the competition.

When asked what made design different at Apple, Ive responded:

A: We struggle with the right words to describe the design process at Apple, but it is very much about designing and prototyping and making. When you separate those, I think the final result suffers. If something is going to be better, it is new, and if it’s new you are confronting problems and challenges you don’t have references for. To solve and address those requires a remarkable focus. There’s a sense of being inquisitive and optimistic, and you don’t see those in combination very often.

On the genesis of new products:

A: What I love about the creative process, and this may sound naive, is this idea that one day there is no idea, and no solution, but then the next day there is an idea. Where you see the most dramatic shift is when you transition from an abstract idea to a slightly more material conversation. But when you make a 3D model, however crude, you bring form to a nebulous idea and everything changes — the entire process shifts. It galvanises and brings focus from a broad group of people. It’s a remarkable process.

Apple’s goal when building a new product:

A: Our goals are very simple — to design and make better products. If we can’t make something that is better, we won’t do it.

Why is the competition seemingly unable to keep pace with Apple?:

A:Most of our competitors are interested in doing something different, or want to appear new — I think those are completely the wrong goals. A product has to be genuinely better. This requires real discipline, and that’s what drives us — a sincere, genuine appetite to do something that is better.

One particularly interesting comment regarded the praise Ive has for Apple’s iOS iPhoto team (which I do not believe Ive is involved with). He gushed, “The iPhoto app we created for the new iPad completely consumes you and you forget you are using an iPad.”

The entire interview is a great read.

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Way back in November, CBS Chief Executive Officer Les Moonves told investors on an earnings call:

..the media company turned down a partnership with Apple for a streaming deal on the Apple TV. Moonves says that the deal was turned down because of the ad-split revenue that Apple was trying to reach an agreement over.

Fast forward to this weekend when the Hollywood Reporter caught up to Moonves at a FUCLA conference:

CBS CEO Leslie Moonves said Saturday that he was approached about a year ago by Steve Jobs to provide content for Apple’s long-rumored television service but he declined to participate.

Moonves told a conference audience that he met with Jobs, the late Apple CEO, and heard a pitch for what was billed as a subscription content service, but ultimately he said he wasn’t interested in providing CBS shows or films to the venture.

“I told Steve, ‘You know more than me about 99 percent of things but I know more about the television business,’ ” Moonves said, citing his concerns about providing content to a service that could disrupt CBS’ existing revenue streams. Moonves said Jobs, in characteristic fashion, strongly disagreed with his assessment.

Yeah, that is not much new, but the point is that CBS still is not going to be partnering with Apple any time soon.

However, streaming is pretty much dead anyway except for live TV, news, weather, and sports. Everything else worth watching is downloadable or already in a Hulu/Netflix/Amazon Cloud.

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Yesterday, reports from The Wall Street Journal claimed the United States Justice Department was planning to launch an antitrust case against Apple and the country’s five largest book publishers related to claims of e-book price fixing. The European Commission announced in December that it would begin investigating whether Apple and book publishers “engaged in illegal agreements or practices that would have the object or the effect of restricting competition.” Many believe the probes are a direct result of Steve Jobs’ comments documented in Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography where the late CEO said: “Amazon screwed it up.”

“We told the publishers, ‘We’ll go to the agency model, where you set the price, and we get our 30 percent, and yes, the customer pays a little more, but that’s what you want anyway… They went to Amazon and said, ‘You’re going to sign an agency contract or we’re not going to give you the books.’ “

Today, new court documents from a request by Apple to throw out a class action case over e-book price fixing revealed Apple’s stance on the issue. PaidContent explained: “Apple argues that its business plan was to sell as many e-books as possible and that it had no incentive to raise prices.” Meanwhile, Apple argued: “Why would Apple offer Amazon’s Kindle app on the iPad.” The company’s comments sidestepped all claims about Apple allegedly conspiring to slow Amazon’s entrance into the tablet market with Kindle Fire:

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Mockup by CiccareseDesingn

In recent months, the increasingly unreliable Digitimes seems quite confident that “Apple is likely to launch a 7.85-inch iPad.” A recent report from the publication in December claimed a 7.85-inch iPad would begin production in Q2 2012 with a launch for the fourth quarter following a “new iPad” (presumably iPad 3) in Q1. The reports keep surfacing today with Digitimes pointing to a report from United Evening News and Oled-Display referring to a “Samsung Securities” document from December that mentions a 7-inch iPad.

Starting with the Samsung document, the company claimed Apple is planning to launch a new 7-inch “iPad mini” in Q3 after the release of iPad 3 in Q1:

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Apple’s relationship with Corning has always remained shrouded in mystery. The relationship started famously when Steve Jobs visited Corning Headquarters in 2006 and told CEO Wendell Weeks not to be afraid to make the stuff.  Corning however never made it into Apple marketing material after that and even isn’t included in Apple’s supplier lists (PDF).

That and Apple’s reliance on Asian parts materials makers had led some to believe that Apple had gone to Asian glass manufacturers for their iPhone production.

In the New York Times’ iEconomy series, Corning is said to have shifted its glass manufacturing to China.

“Our customers are in Taiwan, Korea, Japan and China,” said James B. Flaws, Corning’s vice chairman and chief financial officer. “We could make the glass here, and then ship it by boat, but that takes 35 days. Or, we could ship it by air, but that’s 10 times as expensive. So we build our glass factories next door to assembly factories, and those are overseas.”

However, today, Apple released its US Jobs report which included the following info:

Corning employees in Kentucky and New York who create the majority of the glass for iPhone,..

What’s the takeaway?
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Marvel announced today that comic fans around the globe could now launch the iBooks app and buy its classic graphic novels.

The publisher said it “entered a bold new era in digital comics” with the release of iconic Marvel stories and characters on the free iOS e-book application:

“With an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, Marvel fans across the world can now purchase over 80 graphic novels with fan-favorite characters like Thor, Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk, Wolverine, Spider-Man and more by launching the iBooks app,” wrote the company on the Marvel Comic News website.

Fanatics can visit the Marvel Graphic Novels section on the iTunes Store to start downloading the graphic novels today. Prices currently range from free to $24.99.

The publisher promises to add more titles to the choice each week for a “truly digital comic book reading experience that customers will never forget.”

Moreover, “New Avengers Vol. 1: Breakout” is available free of charge for a limited time. As of press time, the e-book had a 4.5-star rating. There are also literary-adapted graphic novels available for children (“Wonderful Wizard of Oz“) and adults (“Pride & Prejudice“) alike, including a pre-order option for “Marvels.”

It is worth noting that the Walt Disney Company bought Marvel Entertainment in 2009 for over $4 billion. Apple’s late cofounder and CEO Steve Jobs was a Disney shareholder and served on its board of directors until August 2011.

A complete list of Marvel’s iBooks offerings is available below.

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Today The Beatles announced the band’s 27 United States and United Kingdom No. 1 hits are available as ringtones exclusively through iTunes (iTunes Link). The 30-second ringtones are downloadable now through iTunes on your iOS device and include hits such as “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “All You Need Is Love,” “Yesterday,” “Eleanor Rigby,” and 23 others. A full list of all 27 ringtones is after the break. If Steve were alive, these would undoubtedly be his ringtones of choice for his iPhone.

Jobs’ love for The Beatles is documented in Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography where we learned Jobs kept seven different albums from the band on his iPad. He even compared his creative process and business model to The Beatles describing the total being “greater than the sum of the parts.” That is probably a big part of the reason Apple fought so hard to ultimately secure exclusive rights to the band’s music that has lasted since Nov. 2010.

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Apple’s Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook was invited to take part in a roundtable discussion at the National Comprehensive Cancer Network’s annual conference on clinical practice guidelines and quality cancer care. This year’s agenda centers around the topic of “Cancer and Corporate America: Business as Usual?” The five-day discussion begins March 15 in Hollywood, Fla., and ABC News anchor Sam Donaldson will moderate it. The NCNN website listed Cook as an invitee, but there is no guarantee that Apple’s CEO will participate. The fact that a reputable organization invited him means Cook was informed of the conference in advance. A history of late Steve Jobs’ illness gives some hope that Cook will contribute to the discussion. Other invites include doctors, cancer survivors, and other corporate figures, including IBM’s Senior Vice President of Human Resources J. Randall MacDonald.

Whether Cook will take part as a private person or as the CEO of Apple remains unknown, though it is possible he will discuss how Apple can give to medical research. The executive revealed at a recent internal meeting with employees that Apple donated $50 million to Stanford University hospitals, split into $25 million for a new main building and $25 million for a new children’s hospital.

(via The TechBlock)

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There are people—yours truly included—who felt genuinely dumbfounded having read both the authorized “Steve Jobs” biography by Walter Isaacson and Adam Lashinsky’s “Inside Apple.” Do not get me wrong, Isaacson and Lashinsky are among the best contemporary wordsmiths, and their work enlightened us with some previously unknown details about the inner-workings of Apple and the man who cofounded it. Nonetheless, the authors dedicated way too many pages to the stuff we already knew, and their writing style may not appeal to the Technorati accustomed to fast-paced news reporting and sensationalist headlines. Hoping to fill this gap and tell the untold story about Apple of California from a different angle, writer Ken Segall committed to a project tentatively named “Insanely Simple – The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success” (via Daring Fireball).

Few would dare argue that Apple’s agonizing over the tiniest and seemingly unimportant details is what makes the products so pleasurable to use. Segall should know what makes Apple tick: He coined the iMac moniker during his 12-year tenure at TBWA\Chiat\Day, Apple’s and NeXT’s advertising agency, and he now runs an Apple parody website you are probably familiar with called Scoopertino. The author explained the reasoning behind his ambitious undertaking on his personal blog:

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Setteb.it noted that Apple would do a live broadcast of CEO Tim Cook’s remarks tomorrow at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference. Cook usually talks numbers and trends at these events but they are not usually broadcasted live.

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