On Hacker News I came across this amazing vintage Steve Jobs quote: “The Mac user interface was a 10-year monopoly,” says Jobs. “Who ended up running the company? Sales guys. At the critical juncture in the late ’80s, when they should have gone for market share, they went for profits. They made obscene profits for several years. And their products became mediocre. And then their monopoly ended with Windows 95. They behaved like a monopoly, and it came back to bite them, which always happens.”Read more…
“There hasn’t been much excitement or rumors about what Apple will do next. Is the next version of iPhone really all that exciting anymore? What do you think Apple will do to stay current; or would you think that with the lose of Steve Jobs, Apple will expire? There’s the iWatch speculation/rumor, but is this all that interesting? What is so exciting about an iPhone on your wrist? Or do you think Apple is developing some cool device using graphene? A watch that could unfold into an iPhone then further unfold into an tablet would be amazing. But, I don’t feel like Apple will be pulling this rabbit out of their hat. What do you think?” Read more…
A while ago former Apple CEO John Sculley gave an interview in which he confessed to deeply regret his firing of Steve Jobs twenty five years ago. To many it seems obvious that Jobs should have been running the company just as Bill Gates did with Microsoft. However I think Sculley firing Steve Jobs was in fact the best thing that he could have ever done for Apple, and perhaps the entire computer industry. Read more…
In this video Nathan Shedroff talks about the fact that other companies can’t quite “copy and paste” what Apple does well without hiring a Steve Jobs. Apparently Apple uses a “genius design” approach which allows them to produce trailblazing products. I’d say that Nathan is tapping into something larger: Frankly what makes Steve Jobs unique is that unlike so many CEOs he has a genuine respect for creativity and a true empathy for his audience. To me that places him in the same company as a Walt Disney or the head of a fashion or music label. The key ingredient isn’t so much an approach but an ability to cultivate the creativity of a company. So maybe it’s not so much the process itself, but rather having a new role model for CEOs.
What do you get when you put Steve Jobs together with a bunch of sci fi shows and movies? I’m not 100% sure but they’re all in the above video from Kelvington’s Parody Channel. By the way it’s amazing to think how much science fiction impacts the world of tech…
Apple fanboys always love Jobs, however engineering fanboys will always love Woz. In this video Steve Wozniak recounts his creative process of bringing colors to personal computers. While I love the story what’s interesting to be as a videogame fanboy is hearing how he and Jobs were working on designing games at Atari. What’s fascinating is that Woz describes creating the games not as a software programming exercise but as a hardware project! Read more…
I’ve been following the soap opera of all of those tech blogs think they know what Steve Jobs will produce next for his tablet device. However my gut feeling is that science fiction is always the best inspiration for Jobs, and in his case my gut tells me that his inner hippy will bring him back to the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Jobs stole the 3.5″ disk from Star Trek so Kubrick seems to be even better source material. So my prediction is that the tablet will function like the flat-screen tv sets that are seen in the Discovery. In addition to video and graphic displays for monitoring the vital signs of our world I also bet that we’ll see iPhone functionality with potential video conferencing: Read more…
Introduced in 1976 Atari Breakout was a breakthrough game — it’s interesting to note to that future Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak worked on the prototype (who was hired by Steve Jobs). This Japanese piggy bank celebrates this legendary arcade game — and what’s cool about it is that you can actually play a function version of the game on it. I also rather like the fact that all the decals on the piggy bank are in Japanese: Read more…
The history of tech is so ironic: Once upon a time in the early 90s Apple gave birth to the first real PDA — the Newton. I was at the first MacWorld in Boston when an army of eager developers got their hands on this gizmo, you could feel the magic in the air. In retrospect most people look at all of the flaws of the Newton (like a hand writing recognition) but people forget what a breakthrough it was at the time. Read more…
For an entire decade you’ve given it your all — not just to turn around the company we love, but to make computing fun, sexy and exciting again. Read more…
A while ago former Apple CEO John Sculley 
