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Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made by Andy Hertzfeld
Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Atkinson, HyperCard, John Markoff, Mitch Kapor, Paul Graham, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine
He was instrumental in convincing Burrell to switch from the 6809 to the 68000 microprocessor, which turned Jef’s research project into the future of Apple. A year and a half later, in December 1981, he had to leave the project to return to finish his M.D./Ph.D. degree, but he eventually returned to Apple in the summer of 1984. He left Apple to co-found NeXT with Steve Jobs in September 1985, and after a seven-year stint at Sun and year and a half at Eazel, he returned to Apple as a vice president of software technology in January 2002. Steve Wozniak Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple Computer with Steve Jobs in 1976. His brilliant design for the hardware and software of the Apple II created the foundation for Apple’s initial success.
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He’s worked at Apple continuously since 1978, co-designing many of the best Macintoshes over the years, such as the Macintosh IIci. Steve Jobs Steve Jobs co-founded Apple Computer with Steve Wozniak in 1976, when he was twenty-one years old. After being rebuffed by the Lisa team in the fall of 1980, he took over the Mac project from Jef Raskin in January 1981, and led the Macintosh team until John Sculley ousted him in May 1985. He left Apple in September 1985 to co-found NeXT, Inc, and returned to Apple in 1997 after Apple bought NeXT in December 1996. He is currently the CEO of Apple, as well as Pixar, a leading computer animation studio.
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Photo courtesy of Apple Computer, Inc. 54: Bill Gates. © Doug Wilson/CORBIS 60: Apple Lisa Computer. Photo courtesy of Apple Computer, Inc. 68–69: Design team signatures. Photo courtesy of Apple Computer, Inc. 72: Members of the Lisa team. © Roger Ressmeyer/CORBIS 79: Andy Hertzfeld sitting on his car. © D.W. Mellor 83: Crowd at US Festival. © Bettmann/CORBIS 85: Steve Wozniak playing air computer. © Roger Ressmeyer/CORBIS 99: Steve Jobs and Bill Atkinson. © Norman Seeff 104, 107: Alice packaging. Photos courtesy of Apple Computer, Inc. 128: Mike Moritz. © Matthew Naythons 150: Steve Jobs, John Sculley, and Steve Wozniak. © Bettmann/CORBIS 169: Defender® screenshot.
pages: 915 words: 232,883 Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
air freight, Albert Einstein, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, big-box store, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, death of newspapers, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, fixed income, game design, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, lateral thinking, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, profit maximization, publish or perish, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog
The Prototype: Interviews with Art Levinson, Ed Woolard, Millard “Mickey” Drexler, Larry Ellison, Ron Johnson, Steve Jobs, Art Levinson. Cliff Edwards, “Sorry, Steve . . . ,” Business Week, May 21, 2001. Wood, Stone, Steel, Glass: Interviews with Ron Johnson, Steve Jobs. U.S. Patent Office, D478999, Aug. 26, 2003, US2004/0006939, Jan. 15, 2004; Gary Allen, “About Me,” ifoapplestore.com. CHAPTER 30: THE DIGITAL HUB Connecting the Dots: Interviews with Lee Clow, Jony Ive, Steve Jobs. Sheff; Steve Jobs, Macworld keynote address, Jan. 9, 2001. FireWire: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller, Jon Rubinstein. Steve Jobs, Macworld keynote address, Jan. 9, 2001; Joshua Quittner, “Apple’s New Core,” Time, Jan. 14, 2002; Mike Evangelist, “Steve Jobs, the Genuine Article,” Writer’s Block Live, Oct. 7, 2005; Farhad Manjoo, “Invincible Apple,” Fast Company, July 1, 2010; email from Phil Schiller.
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Lev Grossman, “Apple’s New Calling,” Time, Jan. 22, 2007; Steve Jobs, speech, Macworld, Jan. 9, 2007; John Markoff, “Apple Introduces Innovative Cellphone,” New York Times, Jan. 10, 2007; John Heilemann, “Steve Jobs in a Box,” New York, June 17, 2007; Janko Roettgers, “Alan Kay: With the Tablet, Apple Will Rule the World,” GigaOM, Jan. 26, 2010. CHAPTER 37: ROUND TWO The Battles of 2008: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Kathryn Smith, Bill Campbell, Art Levinson, Al Gore, John Huey, Andy Serwer, Laurene Powell, Doug Morris, Jimmy Iovine. Peter Elkind, “The Trouble with Steve Jobs,” Fortune, Mar. 5, 2008; Joe Nocera, “Apple’s Culture of Secrecy,” New York Times, July 26, 2008; Steve Jobs, letter to the Apple community, Jan. 5 and Jan. 14, 2009; Doron Levin, “Steve Jobs Went to Switzerland in Search of Cancer Treatment,” Fortune.com, Jan. 18, 2011; Yukari Kanea and Joann Lublin, “On Apple’s Board, Fewer Independent Voices,” Wall Street Journal, Mar. 24, 2010; Micki Maynard (Micheline Maynard), Twitter post, 2:45 p.m., Jan. 18, 2011; Ryan Chittum, “The Dead Source Who Keeps on Giving,” Columbia Journalism Review, Jan. 18, 2011.
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John Abell, “Google’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Mantra Is ‘Bullshit,’” Wired, Jan. 30, 2010; Brad Stone and Miguel Helft, “A Battle for the Future Is Getting Personal,” New York Times, March 14, 2010. Flash, the App Store, and Control: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Bill Campbell, Tom Friedman, Art Levinson, Al Gore. Leander Kahney, “What Made Apple Freeze Out Adobe?” Wired, July 2010; Jean-Louis Gassée, “The Adobe-Apple Flame War,” Monday Note, Apr. 11, 2010; Steve Jobs, “Thoughts on Flash,” Apple.com, Apr. 29, 2010; Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, Steve Jobs interview, All Things Digital conference, June 1, 2010; Robert X. Cringely (pseudonym), “Steve Jobs: Savior or Tyrant?” InfoWorld, Apr. 21, 2010; Ryan Tate, “Steve Jobs Offers World ‘Freedom from Porn,’” Valleywag, May 15, 2010; JR Raphael, “I Want Porn,” esarcasm.com, Apr. 20, 2010; Jon Stewart, The Daily Show, Apr. 28, 2010.
pages: 363 words: 94,139 Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products by Leander Kahney
Apple II, banking crisis, British Empire, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Computer Numeric Control, Dynabook, global supply chain, interchangeable parts, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, PalmPilot, race to the bottom, RFID, Savings and loan crisis, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, the built environment, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple
Rachel Metz, “Behind Apple’s Products is Longtime Designer Ive,” Associated Press, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2011-08-26/Behind-Apples-products-is-longtime-designer-Ive/50150410/1, updated 8/26/2011. 39. Isaacon, Steve Jobs, Kindle edition. 40. Interview with Jon Rubinstein, October 2012. CHAPTER 5 Jobs Returns to Apple 1. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (Simon & Schuster, 2011), Kindle edition. 2. Steve Jobs at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference 1998, video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJGcJgpOU9w. 3. Apple 10K Annual Report 1998: http://investor.apple.com/secfiling.cfm?
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Interview with Paul Dunn, July 2013. 29. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, Kindle edition. 30. Dike Blair, “Bondi Blue,” Interview with Jonathan Ive for Purple #2, Winter 98/99, 268–75. 31. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, Kindle edition. 32. Benj Edwards, “The Forgotten eMate 300—15 Years Later,” originally in Macweek, December 21, 2012. 33. Interview with Doug Satzger, January 2013. 34. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, Kindle edition. 35. Apple brochure from 1977, noted in Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs. 36. David Kirkpatrick, reporter associate Tyler Maroney, “The Second Coming of Apple Through a Magical Fusion of Man—Steve Jobs—and Company, Apple Is Becoming Itself Again: The Little Anticompany That Could,” Fortune, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1998/11/09/250834/, November 9, 1988. 37.
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Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (Simon & Schuster) Kindle Edition. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. John Paczkowski, “Apple CEO Steve Jobs Live at D8,” http://allthingsd.com/20100601/steve-jobs-session/, June 1, 2010. 5. Scott Forstall, Apple v. Samsung trial testimony. 6. Ibid. 7. Kevin Rose, “Matt Rogers: Founder of Nest Labs interview,” Foundation 21, 2012, video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HegU77X6I2A 8. “On the verge,” The Verge, April 29, 2012, video http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/30/2987892/on-the-verge-episode-005-tony-fadell-and-chris-grant. 9. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, Kindle Edition. 10.
pages: 244 words: 66,599 Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything by Steven Levy
Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Atkinson, computer age, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, information retrieval, information trail, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, Vannevar Bush
But Steve Jobs had an idea for something even more special-Lisa, a computer that would leapfrog Apple's technology, surpassing not only the Apple II, but Apple III as well. This jump would also vault Apple a generation or so past anything that its competitors were preparing. Begun when Steve Wozniak, at Steve Jobs's request, sketched its architecture on a napkin, Lisa had, in less than a year, evolved to a computer based on the powerful Motorola 68000 microprocessor chip, and was engineered to handle more complicated applications, even running several at the same time, a trick called "multitasking." Named after an Apple engineer's daughter (and allegedly an additional tribute to Jobs's own daughter), Lisa was also the first Apple computer specifically directed at office professionals-from white-collar workers to captains of industry.
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The most startling of these was an agreement forged in 1991 to join with another large company to produce the next generation of computers. Apple's new partner was its former blood nemesis-IBM. IBM! To those of us who recalled the rhetoric surrounding Macintosh's introduction-Steve Jobs claiming outright that "IBM is out to crush Apple" -this shift was straight out of Orwell's 1984, when the three global superpowers would shift alliances on a dime. Apple joining with IBM was like Luke Skywalker strolling off into the sunset with Darth Vader. When Apple's profits dipped in 1993, Sculley wound up leaving his post as Apple's leader. The company's board of directors now considered him too much a visionary, an excessively starry-eyed technophile, to make the hard decisions necessary to shepherd Apple through the 1990s.
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The company's board of directors now considered him too much a visionary, an excessively starry-eyed technophile, to make the hard decisions necessary to shepherd Apple through the 1990s. Sculley was permitted to retain the title of chairman, but no longer had a direct role in the company's operations-exactly the fate of Steve Jobs in 1985. The irony was inescapable: originally hired to anchor Jobs's dreamy fantasies, John Sculley apparently departed because his technological seduction had become too complete-he was running Apple too much like Steve Jobs had and, like Jobs, he was gone within months-still attempting to make a dent in the universe but no longer at Apple. (In Sculley's case this new launching pad was a relatively obscute company involved in wireless communications.)
pages: 464 words: 155,696 Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender, Rick Tetzeli
Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Byte Shop, Charles Lindbergh, computer age, corporate governance, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, market design, McMansion, Menlo Park, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, Tim Cook: Apple, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog
Wall Street Journal, October 13, 1988. ———. “How Steve Jobs Linked Up with IBM.” Fortune, October 9, 1989. ———. “The Future of the PC: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Talk About Tomorrow.” Fortune, August 26, 1991. ———. “What Bill Gates Really Wants.” Fortune, January 16, 1995. ———. “Steve Jobs’ Amazing Movie Adventure.” Fortune, September 18, 1995. ———. “Something’s Rotten in Cupertino.” Fortune, March 3, 1997. ———. “The Three Faces of Steve.” Fortune, November 9, 1998. ———. “Apple’s One-Dollar-a-Year Man.” Fortune, January 24, 2000. ———. “Steve Jobs’ Apple Gets Way Cooler.” Fortune, January 24, 2000. ———. “Steve Jobs: Graying Prince of a Shrinking Kingdom.”
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Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution. New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2013. Wozniak, Stephen, and Gina Smith. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. Young, Jeffrey S. Steve Jobs: The Journey Is the Reward. New York: Scott Foresman Trade, 1987. Articles by the Author Schlender, Brenton R. “Jobs, Perot Become Unlikely Partners in Apple Founder’s New Concern.” Wall Street Journal, February 2, 1987. ———. “Next Project: Apple Era Behind Him, Steve Jobs Tries Again, Using a New System.”
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The success of Toy Story had given the myth of Steve Jobs a rather nice touch-up. The question now was whether Steve’s Pixar triumph was a one-shot anomaly. For a man whose name eventually would become synonymous with great American second acts, the Steve Jobs of 1996 had had remarkably little success with his own sequels. The Apple II had been followed by the Apple III and the Lisa, both of which had been failures. The Mac became a success only in the more robust versions introduced by John Sculley. His most grandiose sequel of all, NeXT, the company he’d created to be an idealized version of Apple, had proved utterly anticlimactic.
pages: 611 words: 188,732 Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher
Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, frictionless, glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, random walk, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, tulip mania, V2 rocket, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator
The crucial thing about Facebook is that it’s not a service or an app—it’s a fundamental platform, on the same scale as the internet itself. Steve Jobs: I admire Mark Zuckerberg. I only know him a little bit, but I admire him for not selling out—for wanting to make a company. I admire that a lot. Purple People Eater Apple, the company that cannibalizes itself Only three years after reviving Apple on the back of the iPod, Steve Jobs decides to make it obsolete. As an Atari alumnus, Jobs knows firsthand the danger of trying to milk a hot product for all it is worth. He knows that somebody at some point will unseat Apple’s iPod monopoly with an MP3 player that can also place a phone call. Thus, Jobs concludes, Apple has to act first.
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He was the principal programmer behind Smalltalk, Kay’s pioneering object-oriented computer language, which ran on the Alto computer. When Steve Jobs visited PARC to see the Alto, Ingalls famously gave the demonstration. Later, Ingalls worked for Jobs at Apple. Steve Jarrett was a project manager for General Magic, the smartphone company that spun out of Apple in the midnineties. Later he joined Apple to help launch the original iPod. Today he’s an executive at Facebook, living in London. Steve Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak cofounded Apple, the company most responsible for bringing the personal computer to the masses. Jobs didn’t manage to gain full control of his company until twenty years later, but after he did Apple released a string of hit products—the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad—and it became the most valuable company in the world.
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Dan Kottke: The IPO was November of ’80, and Steve is raring to go. Because he had money to spend, right? The Apple III was launching, but Steve Jobs had already moved on. The Apple III didn’t interest him, because there were too many other people involved and he wanted to be in charge. John Couch: Steve says, “I want to run Lisa,” because it was the newest, newest product. Randy Wigginton: But they weren’t listening to him. Steve Jobs: I thought Lisa was in serious trouble. I thought Lisa was going off in this very bad direction. David Kelley: Lisa—the Apple IV—was really mixed up. Dan Kottke: Steve was trying to bully the Lisa group.
pages: 297 words: 89,820 The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness by Steven Levy
Apple II, Bill Atkinson, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, en.wikipedia.org, Herbert Marcuse, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, social web, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, technology bubble, Thomas L Friedman
This situation was particularly complicated, since the Beatles' record company has the same name as Steve Jobs's computer company. Years ago, when Apple Computer created software to let its users play CDs, the Beatles sued, claiming that the Cupertino company had violated an earlier agreement not to venture into the music business. Apple paid $26 Download million to settle the case in 1991. But the appearance of an Apple iTunes store led the Beatles to claim that Jobs was going beyond the terms of the settlement, which didn't specify that Apple could start its own music store. "It'll get resolved, it's not a big deal," Jobs told me after the other Apple filed suit in London.
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It would take Phil Schiller five days to get back to California. Other people at Apple were stuck in Europe. But with the exception of some managers checking out suppliers in Asia, almost all the people working on the iPod were at home in the Bay Area. At Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, Steve Jobs was sending an e-mail to Apple employees: I'm sure you've heard about today's extraordinary and tragic events. If you want to stay home with your families today, please do so. For those of you who want to come to work, we will be open. Steve By the time of Apple's iPod press conference in October, the plane crashes had been followed by a wave of anthrax attacks.
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I don't recall being so negative myself: I made plans to write about this new toy, discussing with Apple when we might be able to photograph it. In no case, my PR contact said, would Apple send us one to arrive until after the Tuesday launch. They weren't even about to put one into a Federal Express box on Monday, afraid that some-Perfect 13 one might rip open the box and discover Steve Jobs's big secret. Instead, Apple would dispatch a pair of couriers from Cupertino to hand-deliver the new product to a few select tech writers. Apples spokesperson made it clear that they would deliver to no designee, only me. Maybe, I thought, I should have flown out to see this.
pages: 416 words: 129,308 The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant
Airbnb, animal electricity, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, information security, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, John Gruber, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Lyft, M-Pesa, MITM: man-in-the-middle, more computing power than Apollo, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, pirate software, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Tim Cook: Apple, Turing test, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, zero day
i–iV The first two Apple sections, i and ii, are based primarily on interviews with the team responsible for carving out the interaction paradigms that formed the foundation of the iPhone—the user interface, the multitouch software, the early hardware. I conducted interviews with Bas Ording, Imran Chaudhri, Brian Huppi, Joshua Strickon, and Greg Christie, in addition to other members of the original iPhone team on background. Further details and quotes from Jony Ive were taken from Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, Leander Kahney’s Jony Ive, and Brett Schlender’s Becoming Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs “misremembered” the iPhone’s touchscreen genesis in a Q-and-A hosted by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at their annual D: All Things Digital conference.
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i: Exploring New Rich Interactions iPhone in embryo Apple’s user-testing lab at 2 Infinite Loop had been abandoned for years. Down the hall from the famed Industrial Design studio, the space was divided by a one-way mirror so hidden observers could see how ordinary people navigate new technologies. But Apple didn’t do user testing, not since Steve Jobs returned as CEO in 1997. Under Jobs, Apple would show consumers what they wanted, not solicit their feedback. But that deserted lab would make an ideal hideaway for a small group of Apple’s more restless minds, who had quietly embarked on an experimental new project.
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Passionate users felt that FingerWorks’ pads were the only serious ergonomic alternative to keyboards, and now that they’d been taken away, more than a few Finger Fans blamed Apple. “People with chronic RSI injuries were suddenly left out in the cold, in 2005, by an uncaring Steve Jobs,” Dstamatis wrote. “Apple took an important medical product off the market.” No major product has emerged to serve RSI-plagued computer users, and the iPhone and iPad offer only a fraction of the novel interactivity of the original pads. Apple took FingerWorks’ gesture library and simplified it into a language that a child could understand—recall that Apple’s Brian Huppi had called FingerWorks’ gesture database an “exotic language”—which made it immensely popular.
The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara
"side hustle", A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, carried interest, clean water, cleantech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer age, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, transcontinental railway, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K
Alan Maltun, “Students Beg to Stay After School to Use Computers”; David Einstein, “Bellflower Paces Area Schools in Computer Field”; Bob Williams, “Computer Parade Uneven,” The Los Angeles Times, December 11, 1983, SB1. 30. Andrew Emil Gansky, “Myths and Legends of the Anti-Corporation: A History of Apple, Inc., 1976–1997,” PhD dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin, 2017; Watters, “How Steve Jobs Brought the Apple II to the Classroom”; Harry McCracken, “The Apple Story is an Education Story: A Steve Jobs Triumph Missing from the Movie,” The 74, October 15, 2015, https://www.the74million.org/article/the-apple-story-is-an-education-story-a-steve-jobs-triumph-missing-from-the-movie/, archived at https://perma.cc/EZV6-UGLT. 31. Natasha Singer, “How Google Took Over the Classroom,” The New York Times, May 14, 2017, 1. 32. “’82 House Freshmen Eschew Partisanship and Posturing,” The Washington Post, December 26, 1982, A1; Zschau, “Tax Policy Initiatives to Promote High Technology,” May 13, 1983, Box 51, FF Capital Gains 1, Ed Zschau Papers, HH. 33.
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Horace Dediu, “The iOS Economy, Updated,” Asymco blog, January 8, 2018, http://www.asymco.com/2018/01/08/the-ios-economy-updated/, archived at https://perma.cc/W2Z5-MT6G. 11. Bruce Newman, “Steve Jobs, Apple Co-Founder,” San Jose Mercury News, October 5, 2011. 12. “Remembering Steve,” Apple.com, https://www.apple.com/stevejobs/, archived at https://perma.cc/7SES-3F5F; Maria L. LaGanga, “Steve Jobs’ death saddens Apple workers and fans,” The Los Angeles Times, October 6, 2011. 13. “Steve Jobs’ Memorial Service: 6 Highlights,” The Week, October 25, 2011. 14. “What Happened to the Future?” Founders Fund, http://foundersfund.com/the-future/, archived at https://perma.cc/82XW-VA2A. 15.
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House Democratic Caucus, Rebuilding the Road to Opportunity: Turning Point for America’s Economy (Washington: USGPO, 1982). 23. “Steve Jobs and David Burnham,” Nightline, ABC News, April 10, 1981, archived at https://perma.cc/4UER-Y3YV. 24. David Morrow, oral History interview with Steve Jobs, Palo Alto, Calif., April 20, 1995, Smithsonian Institution. 25. Quoted in Audrey Watters, “How Steve Jobs Brought the Apple II to the Classroom,” Hack Education.com, February 25, 2015, http://hackeducation.com/2015/02/25/kids-cant-wait-apple, archived at https://perma.cc/3K62-ACW5. 26. Milton B. Stewart, “Polishing the Apple,” Inc., Feb. 1, 1983, https://www.inc.com/magazine/19830201/6207.html, archived at https://perma.cc/K7UQ-4ACC. 27.
pages: 459 words: 140,010 Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer by Michael Swaine, Paul Freiberger
1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Fairchild Semiconductor, Gary Kildall, gentleman farmer, Google Chrome, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Ken Thompson, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog
In addition to unveiling its new computer, Apple announced the new software it intended to have ready by the time the machine shipped a few months later—a word processor, a spreadsheet program, an enhanced BASIC, and a sophisticated operating system. The marketing plan called for the Apple III to be portrayed as a serious computer that could be used in professional offices. The machine seemed likely to succeed. A few months later, continuing to ride the tide of acclaim, Apple announced its first public stock offering. The Wall Street Journal wrote, “Not since Eve has an apple posed such temptation.” * * * Figure 69. Apple goes public Mike Markkula presents Steve Jobs with a check for $92 million from his stock offering in Apple. (Courtesy of Apple Computer Inc.) When Apple was first formed, Mike Markkula dreamed of building the largest privately held company in the nation, a company fully owned by its employees.
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The number of Apple dealers had risen to 3,000. Mike Markkula took over for Scotty as president of Apple, a position he believed to be a temporary one, and at age 26 Steve Jobs became chairman of the board. Apple was now investing millions of dollars in research and development to create a product that would stun the world. It wanted to prove that it had learned the lessons of the Apple III, that Apple could indeed introduce a new product successfully. By the fall of 1981, rumors abounded in the trade journals about new products Apple was developing. The rumors were wrong, though not even Apple realized it at the time.
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Some questioned his choice of processor, but no one argued with the processor’s $20 price tag. He called his machine an Apple. * * * Figure 57. The Apple I Steve Wozniak’s original Apple I was a circuit board. (Courtesy of Apple Computer Inc.) The Apple I had only the bare essentials. It lacked a case, a keyboard, and a power supply. The hobbyist owner had to connect a transformer to it in order to get it to work. The Apple I also required laborious assembly by hand. Woz spent a lot of time helping friends implement his design. Steve Jobs saw a great financial opportunity in this skeletal machine, and urged Woz to start a company with him.
pages: 275 words: 84,418 Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution by Fred Vogelstein
Apple II, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, cloud computing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, Dynabook, Firefox, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Googley, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software patent, SpaceShipOne, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, web application, zero-sum game
Because of the iPod: Apple press release, 4/9/2007. Jobs said he never saw: Kara Swisher, “Full D8 Interview Video: Apple CEO Steve Jobs,” Steve Jobs interviewed by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg (video), AllThingsD.com, 6/7/2010, available at www.allthingsd.com/20100607/full-d8-video-apple-ceo-steve-jobs. Apple’s three-year head start: “Apple Says App Store Has Made Developers over $1 Billion,” AppleInsider.com, 6/10/2010. 7. The iPad Changes Everything—Again Starting in 2010 Jobs had: “Apple’s Diabolical Plan to Screw Your iPhone,” iFixIt.com, 1/20/2011. “It turns out”: Beth Callaghan, “Steve Jobs’s Appearances at D, the Full Video Sessions,” AllThingsD.com, 10/5/2011.
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Jobs was personally offended: Kara Swisher, “Blast from D Past Video: Apple’s Steve Jobs at D1 in 2003,” AllThingsD.com, 5/3/2010. It’s hard to imagine: “iPhone,” Wikipedia; cross-checked with Apple financial statements. Publicly, Jobs continued his: Kara Swisher, “Blast from D Past: Apple’s Steve Jobs at D2 in 2004,” AllThingsD.com, 5/10/2010. The tension between the partners: Frank Rose, “Battle for the Soul of the MP3 Phone,” Wired, 11/2005. Jobs successfully pinned the Rokr screwup: “iPod Sales per Quarter,” Wikipedia; cross-checked with Apple financial statements; Peter Burrows, “Working with Steve Jobs,” Bloomberg Businessweek, 10/12/2011.
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But perhaps the most notable example: Jessica Lessin, “An Apple Exit over Maps,” Wall Street Journal, 10/29/2012; Liz Gannes, “Google Maps for iPhone Had 10 Million Downloads in 48 Hours,” AllThingsD.com, 12/17/2012. Apple’s Tim Cook knows all the challenges: Ina Fried, “Apple’s Tim Cook: The Full D11 Interview,” Tim Cook interviewed by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher (video), AllThingsD.com, 5/29/2013, available at www.allthingsd.com/20130529/apples-tim-cook-the-full-d11-interview-video. Jobs was a master: Peter Kafka, “Apple CEO Steve Jobs at D8: The Full, Uncut Interview,” Steve Jobs interviewed by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher (video), AllThingsD.com, 6/7/2010, available at www.allthingsd.com/20100607/steve-jobs-at-d8-the-full-uncut-interview. Acknowledgments Writing is usually a solitary act.
pages: 255 words: 76,834 Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs by Ken Kocienda
1960s counterculture, anti-pattern, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bash_history, Bill Atkinson, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, HyperCard, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, premature optimization, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, The Soul of a New Machine, zero-sum game
johnaugust.com. https://johnaugust.com/2009/what-does-execution-dependent-mean. Accessed November 16, 2017. 10. At This Point 1. Apple Newsroom, “Steve Jobs Resigns as CEO of Apple,” August 24, 2011. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2011/08/24Steve-Jobs-Resigns-as-CEO-of-Apple/. Accessed November 16, 2017. Apple Newsroom, “Letter from Steve Jobs,” August 24, 2011. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2011/08/24Letter-from-Steve-Jobs/. Accessed November 16, 2017. Apple Newsroom, “Apple Media Advisory,” October 5, 2011. Accessed November 16, 2017. Index The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book.
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Patent 7,469,381, filed December 14, 2007, and issued December 23, 2008. This is the patent describing inertial scrolling. http://patft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber=7469381; Matt Brian, “The Apple Patent Steve Jobs Fought Hard to Protect, and His Connection to Its Inventor,” The Next Web, August 7, 2012. Accessed November 19, 2017. https://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/08/07/the-apple-patent-steve-jobs-fought-hard-to-protect-and-his-connection-with-its-inventor/ 3. “Crackberry,” Urban Dictionary. Accessed November 14, 2017. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Crackberry 4.
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While other companies design beautiful hardware, excel at marketing, hire good lawyers, and manufacture gadgets at scale, no other company makes software as intuitive, carefully crafted, or just plain fun. If there’s a unique magic in Apple’s products, it’s in the software, and I’ll tell you how we created some of the most important software in the company’s history. When I joined Apple in 2001, desktop and laptop computers were still the company’s main products, and while the colorful iMac had been a notable success in reestablishing Apple as a design leader in high technology—Steve Jobs had been back for four years following his eleven-year exile—the company still sat below 5 percent share in a market dominated by Microsoft Windows. Apple certainly had its core enthusiasts at that time, and they were passionate about its products, but to everyone else, the Mac was a computer they might have used in college but forgot about when they became adults and got jobs.
pages: 390 words: 114,538 Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internet by Charles Arthur
activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, pre–internet, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, software patent, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, turn-by-turn navigation, upwardly mobile
Notes Chapter One 1998 1 Ken Auletta (2009) Googled: The end of the world as we know it, Virgin Books, London. 2 http://gladwell.com/outliers 3 http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html 4 http://www.cultofmac.com/john-sculley-on-steve-jobs-the-full-interview-transcript/63295 5 Alan Deutschman (2000) The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, Broadway Books, New York. 6 http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/58082/16-Brilliant-Insights-From-Steve-Jobs-Keynote-Circa-1997.aspx 7 http://www.zdnet.com/news/jobs-apple-still-on-right-track/99946 8 http://news.cnet.com/Dell-Apple-should-close-shop/2100-1001_3-203937.html 9 http://money.cnn.com/2008/11/09/technology/cook_apple.fortune/index.htm 10 http://www.industryweek.com/articles/whats_really_driving_apples_recovery_325.aspx 11 http://www.cringely.com/2010/04/masters-tournament 12 http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html 13 http://blog.tomevslin.com/2005/02/att_lessons_fro.html 14 http://frozennorth.org/C509291565/E668712860/index.html 15 http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/ Chapter Two Microsoft antitrust 1 Private e-mail. 2 Private e-mail.
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In 1998 Microsoft was crushing yet another upstart – Netscape, which had had the temerity to suggest that the browser could become the basis for doing work anywhere, so that Windows itself would become irrelevant; all you’d need would be a computer that could run a browser, and you’d be able to do everything for which you presently needed a PC. Steve Jobs and Apple Microsoft had reached the pinnacle by besting Apple – the company co-founded by Steve Jobs, a charming, brilliant, tempestuous, iconoclastic, unique businessman who had been thrown out of it in 1985 but returned, triumphantly, at the end of 1996 when another company he had set up, NeXT Computer, was bought by the then ailing Apple, which was bleeding cash. He forced out the incumbent chief executive in July 1997 and became ‘interim’ chief executive that September – at which point the company had made a loss of a billion dollars for the financial year.
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Among those also targeted for Microsoft’s arm-twisting via Windows to try to crush other products in different fields, the trial heard, were Intel, Sun Microsystems, Real Networks, IBM – which was denied an OEM licence for Windows 95 until a quarter of an hour before its official launch, and so missed out on huge swathes of PC sales – and Apple. In particular, Apple was offered a deal: stop developing its own systems for playing music and films on Windows, and let Microsoft handle them using its DirectX system. If it did, Microsoft would stop putting obstacles in the way of Apple’s QuickTime on Windows. Steve Jobs, who was at the meeting in June 1998, rejected the idea because it would limit the ability for third parties to develop content that would run on Windows PCs and Apple machines. (In retrospect, that decision may be one of the most significant to Apple’s later success that Jobs ever made, since it meant that Microsoft could not control how Apple-encoded music was played on Windows.)
pages: 615 words: 168,775 Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age by Leslie Berlin
AltaVista, Apple II, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, discovery of DNA, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, inventory management, John Markoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, Leonard Kleinrock, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, packet switching, Project Xanadu, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, union organizing, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce
Tesler could not help but contrast the situation at PARC with what he had seen of Apple. By 1980, he had an inside view. His first extended encounter with Apple came in December 1979, when he, along with Adele Goldberg (also from Alan Kay’s group in PARC’s systems science lab), gave two demonstrations of the Alto to a group from Apple that included Steve Jobs.9 Six months before the demos, in June 1979, Xerox had purchased 100,000 shares of Apple for $1.05 million in Apple’s second round of private investment.IV An investment in Apple made sense for Xerox because if the smaller company did well, Xerox could make a good deal of money, and if Apple failed, Xerox would be well positioned to acquire it.III Apple, by this time, was seen as such a potentially lucrative investment that Markkula could hand-select investors.
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Comment from stevewoz at http://www.cultofmac.com/96939/apples-first-ceo-says-young-steve-jobs-could-be-trusted-with-detail-but-not-with-a-staff/. 34. Ann Bowers, interview by author, Nov. 7, 2015. 35. “The overriding consideration was pride—Mike just wasn’t going to let anything stand in the way of making Apple a huge success and fulfilling the implied commitment to the Apple employees.” Introductory remarks given by Arthur Rock at the Harvard Business School Entrepreneurial Award Dinner Honoring Steve Jobs and Mike Markkula, San Francisco Olympic Club, Feb. 3, 1983, AR. 36. Mike Markkula, interview by author, Feb. 24, 2016. 37. Steve Jobs, quoted in “Apple Shuffling Reflects Growth,” Computer Systems News, April 13, 1981. 38.
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He calls the ethics center “the most bang for my philanthropic buck that I’ve ever gotten.”9 Markkula remained on Apple’s board until 1997, when Steve Jobs, who had left the company a dozen years earlier to launch NeXT, returned and asked him, along with every other Apple director save two, to resign. Markkula and Jobs had been somewhat estranged for years. Jobs felt betrayed by Markkula’s backing John Sculley over him in the power struggle that had pushed him out of Apple in 1985. Markkula thought that Jobs had left Apple in a way that was “unethical,” recruiting employees for NeXT while still chairing the Apple board.10 But the conversation upon Jobs’s return after Apple purchased NeXT for $429 million was long and cordial.
pages: 305 words: 79,303 The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway
activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, cloud computing, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional
I believe the world would be a better place had LS&Co. registered Apple-like success, as the Haas family (who own LS&Co.) is what you hope all business owners would be: modest, committed to the community, and generous. Steve Jobs brought Drexler onto Apple’s board of directors in 1999, soon after his return to Apple—and two years later Apple launched its first brick-and-mortar store in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia.30 Apple’s stores were glitzier than Gap stores. Most experts yawned. Brick and mortar, they said, was the past. The internet was the future. As if Steve Jobs, of all people, didn’t understand that. It’s difficult to remember now, but when Apple made that move back then, most people figured the company was wrong; that Apple was a company lurching toward irrelevance; and that by opening fancy stores it was positioning itself for luxury with the equivalent of a walker.
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They are growing their income, spending it irrationally, as young people do, and have a facility with technology that makes them influential and important to business.4 They sided with Apple, as the firm embodies their own maverick, antiestablishment, progressive ideals—and conveniently ignored the fact that Steve Jobs gave nothing to charity, almost exclusively hired middle-aged white guys, and was an awful person. It didn’t matter, because Apple is cool. Even more, Apple is an innovator. And so, when the federal government decides to force Apple to change its behavior, the Apple Macolytes leap to its defense. I’m not one of them. Double Standard I’ve always tried to give the impression that I just don’t care what others think.
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That set the stage for the masterpiece—the iPhone—that had Apple fanatics all over the world camping out in front of electronics stores. And finally, the sublime iPad. The unsung hero of Apple’s success is Napster founder Shawn Fanning, who scared the music industry into the arms of Apple, and who set about partnering with them similar to the way a vampire partners with a blood bag. Could Apple have maintained this pace into the current decade had Steve Jobs survived his illness? Probably. Because for all of his less than savory traits, he accomplished one important thing: he turned Apple, after the risk-averse years under John Sculley, into a company—arguably the biggest company ever—that made taking risks its first option.
pages: 540 words: 119,731 Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech by Geoffrey Cain
Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, business intelligence, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double helix, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Hacker News, independent contractor, Internet of things, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, patent troll, rolodex, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons
Samsung, however, won legal victories: Charles Arthur, “Samsung Galaxy Tab ‘Does Not Copy Apple’s Designs,’ ” The Guardian, October 18, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/oct/18/samsung-galaxy-tab-apple-ipad; Associated Press, “Samsung Wins Korean Battle in Apple Patent War,” August 24, 2012, https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/samsung-wins-korean-battle-in-apple-patent-war-1.1153862; Mari Saito and Maki Shiraki, “Samsung Triumphs Over Apple in Japan Patent Case,” Reuters, August 31, 2012, https://in.reuters.com/article/us-apple-samsung-japan/samsung-wins-over-apple-in-japan-patent-case-idINBRE87U05R20120831. Steve Jobs was an admirer of Sony: Leander Kahney, “Steve Jobs’ Sony Envy [Sculley Interview],” Cult of Mac, October 14, 2010, https://www.cultofmac.com/63316/steve-jobs-sony-envy-sculley-interview/.
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Steve Jobs was an admirer of Sony: Leander Kahney, “Steve Jobs’ Sony Envy [Sculley Interview],” Cult of Mac, October 14, 2010, https://www.cultofmac.com/63316/steve-jobs-sony-envy-sculley-interview/. Apple designers borrowed: Christina Bonnington, “Apple v. Samsung: 5 Surprising Reveals in Latest Court Documents,” Wired, July 27, 2012, https://www.wired.com/2012/07/apple-reveals-for-monday-trial/. “We are going to patent it all”: Fred Vogelstein, Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution (New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2013), p. 172. calling their larger phones “Hummers”: Chris Ziegler, “Apple’s Steve Jobs: ‘No One’s Going to Buy’ a Big Phone,” Engadget, July 16, 2010, https://www.engadget.com/2010/07/16/jobs-no-ones-going-to-buy-a-big-phone/.
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But that didn’t deter Jobs: Alan Kay, “American Computer Pioneer Alan Kay’s Concept, the Dynabook, Was Published in 1972. How Come Steve Jobs and Apple iPad Get the Credit for Tablet Invention?” Quora, April 21, 2019, https://www.quora.com/American-computer-pioneer-Alan-Kay-s-concept-the-Dynabook-was-published-in-1972-How-come-Steve-Jobs-and-Apple-iPad-get-the-credit-for-tablet-invention/answer/Alan-Kay-11. would need to be portable: Jay Elliot, interview by the author, January 9, 2014. Jobs disembarked at the grimy: Jay Elliot, interview by the author, January 9, 2014. Samsung began supplying Apple: Frank Rose, West of Eden: The End of Innocence at Apple Computer (New York: Stuyvesant Street Press, 1989), p. 163.
pages: 385 words: 101,761 Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum
3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar
; http://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/ online/jonathan-ive-on-apple/ imac-1998, accessed September 5, 2012. 187 Next the team traveled: Burrows, “Who Is Jonathan Ive?”; http://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/ online/jonathan-ive-on-apple/imac-1998, accessed September 5, 2012; Janet Abrams, “Radical Craft/The Second Art Center Design Conference,” http://www.core77.com/reactor/ 04.06_artcenter.asp, accessed September 5, 2012. 187 Ive then spent yet more: Burrows, “Who Is Jonathan Ive?” 188 They also designed a beautiful: Neil Hughes, “Book Details Apple’s ‘Packaging Room,’ Steve Jobs’ Interest in Advanced Cameras,” Apple Insider, January 24, 2012, accessed September 5, 2012, http://www.appleinsider.com/ articles/12/01/24/book_details_apples_packaging_ room_interests_in_advanced_cameras_.html; Yonu Heisler, “Inside Apple’s Secret Packaging Room,” Network World, January 24, 2012, accessed September 5, 2012, http://www.networkworld.com/community/ blog/inside-apples-secret-packaging-room. 188 The iMac’s launch in 1998: http://www.youtube.com/watch?
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Instead of being a technological marvel, the Sony VCR would be a great consumer experience. It’s no accident that when he launched his company, Steve Jobs followed the Sony model of a consumer-friendly technology company. He knew that it was always tempting for technology companies to frame themselves from the engineer’s point of view, not the consumer’s. Over time, Jobs would fight his engineers constantly to keep Apple products easy to use. No one has reframed the story of personal technology quite like Steve Jobs. With every new product, he further moved the focus away from engineered functionality and toward user experience.
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Seidensticker (Stony Creek, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1977), 16. 186 Walter Benjamin argued: Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed. (New York: Schocken, 1968). 187 When Steve Jobs returned: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 348–57. 187 Designers Jonathan Ive and Danny Coster: Peter Burrows, “Who Is Jonathan Ive? The Man Behind Apple’s Design Magic,” IN: Inside Innovation, September 2006. The “jelly bean story” was told to Peter Burrows at the Radical Craft Conference at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, in 2006, and reported on in IN magazine, a quarterly magazine inside BusinessWeek, which I founded that year and edited.
To Pixar and Beyond by Lawrence Levy
computerized trading, index card, Loma Prieta earthquake, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, spice trade, Steve Jobs, Wall-E
The last thing I expected was to speak to a celebrity. “Hi, is this Lawrence?” “Yes, it’s me.” “This is Steve Jobs,” the voice on the other end of the line said. “I saw your picture in a magazine a few years ago and thought we’d work together someday.” Even in those days, when the downfall of Steve Jobs was a favorite topic around Silicon Valley eateries, a call from him was enough to stop me in my tracks. Maybe he wasn’t as hot as he had been before his unceremonious departure from Apple ten years earlier, but our industry had never had a more charismatic figure. I couldn’t help but feel a spurt of excitement at realizing not only that he knew who I was, but that he had actually called me.
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Classification: LCC PN1998.3.L4673 A32016 (print) | LCC PN1998.3.L4673 (ebook) | DDC 791.4302/3092—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016020541 COVER DESIGN BY BRIAN MOORE eISBN 978-0-544-73419-7 v1.1016 For Hillary, Jason, Sarah, and Jenna Prologue “Hey, Steve, you up for a walk?” I asked over the phone. It was the fall of 2005. Steve Jobs and I had asked each other that question countless times over the past ten years. But this time was different. Steve had turned fifty earlier that year and the burden of cancer and surgery was taking its toll. For a while now we had kept our talks and walks light. Steve had enough on his hands at Apple. In the past year he had introduced a new line of iPods, including the brand-new iPod shuffle and iPod nano that continued to usher in a new era of music listening.
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His last two products before being stripped of all responsibilities at Apple in 1985—the Lisa and the original Macintosh computers—had both been commercial disasters, and the NeXT Computer was regarded by many observers as the triumph of hubris over practicality. It had been heralded as a technological marvel, but it had been unable to compete with the likes of Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics that sold less expensive, more compatible machines. More and more, Jobs was looking like yesterday’s news. When I told friends and colleagues that I was meeting Steve Jobs about Pixar, the most common response was “Why would you want to do that?”
pages: 207 words: 57,959 Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries by Peter Sims
Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Black Swan, Clayton Christensen, complexity theory, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, discovery of penicillin, endowment effect, fail fast, fear of failure, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, PageRank, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, theory of mind, Toyota Production System, urban planning, Wall-E
Pixar was a computer hardware company when Steve Jobs bought it in 1986. Before purchasing Pixar, Jobs had been forced out of Apple in 1985 by his hand-picked CEO successor, John Scully, following frequent clashes. Scully wanted Jobs to focus exclusively on products, while Jobs wanted to take Apple back over from Scully. After Scully caught wind of an attempted coup by Jobs when Scully was on a trip to Asia, he stripped Jobs of his responsibilities. Jobs then left Apple, bought Pixar, and started another computer company, called Next Computer. Both Pixar and Next struggled, and the open question was whether Steve Jobs was just another one-hit wonder.
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by Bronwyn Fryer, Harvard Business Review blog, September 28, 2009, which can be found at: http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/hbreditors/2009/09/how_do_innovators_think.html. Jeff Bezos quote from: “Institutional Yes: The HBR Interview with Jeff Bezos,” by Julia Kirby and Thomas Stewart, Harvard Business Review, October 2007. Apple and Steve Jobs: Inside Steve’s Brain, by Leander Kahney, Portfolio (2008), 190–197. “Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing,” by Gary Wolf, Wired, March 2002. Steve Jobs calligraphy example taken from his 2005 Stanford Commencement speech. James Chanos reference: Interview with Chanos. Jerry Seinfeld: Drawn from The Comedian (DVD), Directed by Christian Charles, with Jerry Seinfeld (2002).
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CHAPTER 3 Failing Quickly to Learn Fast Being rigorous about spotting flaws and continuing to push toward excellence is essential to creative achievement. After all, Chris Rock, the Pixar filmmakers, Frank Gehry, Steve Jobs, and Colonel Casey Haskins are all perfectionists and yet they accept, even welcome, failure as they develop new ideas and strategies. Rock won’t appear on national television without perfecting his act, while Gehry was for years frustrated by the imperfections he noticed while watching performances at Disney Hall (he’s past that now). Steve Jobs will famously refuse to release a new Apple product, or product enclosure even, until it’s as close to perfect as possible. Yet none of them allow perfectionism to paralyze their creative processes, at least not for long.
pages: 199 words: 56,243 Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, Alan Eagle
Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, cloud computing, El Camino Real, Erik Brynjolfsson, fear of failure, Jeff Bezos, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, PalmPilot, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Tim Cook: Apple
Going out to the wild, woolly west, where it was more a meritocracy, I would have a chance to move quickly and sit on the management team.”8 Move quickly, indeed. Within nine months of joining Apple, Bill was promoted to VP of sales and marketing and given the task of overseeing the launch of the highly anticipated Macintosh, Apple’s new computer that would replace the Apple II as the company’s flagship product. To kick off the launch, the company made a big move: it bought a slot to run a commercial during the Super Bowl, which would be played in Tampa, Florida, on January 22, 1984. Once the ad was produced, Bill and the team showed it to Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. An allusion to George Orwell’s novel 1984, it showed a young woman running through a dark hallway, fleeing guards, and emerging into a chamber where hundreds of gray-clad, head-shaven men are listening, zombie-like, to a droning “big brother” figure on a large screen before them.
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.* Although he did not know it at the time, he was about to enter the third chapter of his career, a return to coaching full-time, but not on a football field. When Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985, Bill Campbell was one of the few leaders at the company who fought against the move. Dave Kinser, an Apple colleague of Bill’s at the time, recalls Bill saying that “we’ve got to keep Steve in the company. He’s way too talented to just let him leave!” Steve remembered that loyalty. When he returned to Apple and became its CEO in 1997, and most of the board members stepped down, Steve named Bill as one of the new directors.* (Bill served on the Apple board until 2014.) Steve and Bill became close friends, speaking frequently and spending many Sunday afternoons walking around their Palo Alto neighborhood discussing all sorts of topics.
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He was a football coach turned sales guy. Yet somehow, Bill had become so influential that he went on a weekly Sunday walk with Steve Jobs, and the Google founders said they wouldn’t have made it without him. Bill’s name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it. Eventually it hit me: I recognized him from a case I had taught a few times on a management dilemma at Apple in the mid-1980s, when a brave, bright young manager named Donna Dubinsky challenged a distribution plan from Steve Jobs himself. Bill Campbell was Donna’s boss’s boss, and he dished out exactly the kind of tough love you’d expect from a football coach: he tore her proposal apart, pushed her to come up with something stronger, and then stood up for her.
pages: 255 words: 68,829 How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid by Franck Frommer
Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, business continuity plan, cuban missile crisis, dematerialisation, disinformation, hypertext link, invention of writing, inventory management, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, new economy, oil shock, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, union organizing
Aside from the usual tricks of a good PowerPoint presentation—simple slides, well organized argument, speaker involvement, moments of feeling, and so on—he points to some unusual innovations that make Steve Jobs a great stage director: constant invention of an enemy against which Apple must always fight,24 an extraordinary feeling for slogans, the ability to make sense out of numbers by magnifying them, and a constant search for analogies or comparisons to make them as eloquent as possible. And finally, Steve Jobs has the ability to create memorable moments, discreetly accentuated by technological wizardry, that the audience will long remember. With Steve Jobs, we touch on the quintessence of oral presentation. The performance becomes its own subject, the medium mediates itself and is no longer there simply to communicate messages and persuade an audience.
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The “Mac family” waits like impatient fans for Steve Notes, the boss’s presentation.16 Over the years, these annual meetings have become highly codified ceremonies, the staging of which Steve Jobs has brought to a high polish. Helped by increasingly inventive technology, the entertainer of the early days turned into a guru able to convert millions of the faithful into purchasers of his latest technological gadgets. Boston, January 1997, Macworld Conference Expo: it is a historic moment. As the mythical brand is running out of steam—not only are the numbers down, but the notoriety and the originality of Apple are under severe strain—Steve Jobs, then president of Pixar,17 returns after ten years away. He is greeted like a messiah by the Apple community, which sees his return as a sign of renewal.
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The presentation follows a well-tried plan: brief slide on earnings—better to be quick; they’re bad—then Steve Jobs, armed with his remote, the essential tool of Steve Notes, briefly recounts his time at Pixar, then follows with three quotations that appear on the screen. “Apple has become irrelevant.” “Apple can’t execute anything.”18 “Apple’s culture is anarchy; you can’t manage it.” Jobs’s entire presentation is based on these three negative judgments. The procedure is clever; it enables him to build, practically in real time, Apple’s new strategy on the basis of criticisms made of it and to bring out the value of the innovative products and services intended to contradict these received ideas.
pages: 720 words: 197,129 The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson
1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler
Hardware hackers such as Wozniak ceded primacy to software coders such as Gates. With the Apple II and then, more notably, the Macintosh in 1984, Apple pioneered the practice of creating machines that users were not supposed to open and fiddle with their innards. The Apple II also established a doctrine that would become a religious creed for Steve Jobs: his company’s hardware was tightly integrated with its operating system software. He was a perfectionist who liked to control the user experience end to end. He didn’t want to let you buy an Apple machine and run someone else’s clunky operating system on it, nor buy Apple’s operating system and put it on someone else’s junky hardware.
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But growth began to taper off, largely because Commodore’s computer sales were slumping in the face of new competition from Apple and others. “We have to take control of our destiny,” Kimsey told Case.29 It was clear that for Quantum to succeed, it had to create its Link online services for other computer makers, most notably Apple. With the tenacity that came with his patient personality, Case targeted the executives at Apple. Even after its brilliantly controlling cofounder Steve Jobs had been forced out of the company, at least for the time being, Apple was difficult to partner with. So Case moved across the country to Cupertino and took an apartment near Apple’s headquarters. From there he waged his siege.
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Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 135. 108. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 94. 109. Author’s interview with Steve Jobs. 110. Steve Jobs presentation, Jan. 1984, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B-XwPjn9YY. 111. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 173. 112. Author’s interview with Andy Hertzfeld. 113. Author’s interviews with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. 114. Andy Hertzfeld, Revolution in the Valley (O’Reilly Media, 2005), 191. See also Andy Hertzfeld, http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=A_Rich_Neighbor_Named_Xerox.txt. 115. Author’s interviews with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. 116. Author’s interview with Steve Jobs. 117.
pages: 359 words: 96,019 How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story by Billy Gallagher
Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, gamification, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Lean Startup, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, Oculus Rift, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, QR code, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, too big to fail, Y Combinator, young professional
Snapchat investors and advisors, afraid of irritating Evan, have often been unwilling to speak publicly about even basic things like how the company differentiates itself and what its mission is. Evan is hardly the first tech founder to be secretive. Some of the industry’s most revered leaders like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos are known for their intense corporate secrecy. As much as Evan has had a rivalry with Mark Zuckerberg, he has also been empowered by Zuckerberg, who blazed the trail for him. Steve Jobs was not the CEO of Apple until his second stint with the company; Google’s investors demanded they bring in Eric Schmidt as a more professional CEO than cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. But Zuckerberg’s overwhelming success and maturation from immature genius into visionary CEO caused a shift in Silicon Valley to strongly favor founders as CEOs.
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Michael. Return to the Little Kingdom: How Apple and Steve Jobs Changed the World. New York: Overlook Press, 2009. Reis, Eric. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. New York: Crown Business, 2011. Roose, Kevin. Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street’s Post-Crash Recruits. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2014. Rose, Todd. The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness. New York: HarperOne, 2016. Schlender, Brent, and Rick Tetzeli. Becoming Steve Jobs. New York: Crown Business, 2015. Sorkin, Andrew Ross.
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By the time Reggie had his epiphany, the tech world was embracing front-facing cameras. On October 14, 2011, Apple released the iPhone 4S, its second phone with a front-facing camera (making the iPhone 4, also with a front-facing camera, more affordable). Apple’s front-facing cameras were mostly for its video chat feature, FaceTime, but were starting to be used for photographs as well. Technology and art were converging as the iPhone created amateur photographers of everyone. Evan wanted to build Snapchat as an art and technology company, modeled after two of his heroes, Edwin Land and Steve Jobs. Jobs had also considered Land a personal hero and someone he modeled his career after.
pages: 559 words: 157,112 Dealers of Lightning by Michael A. Hiltzik
Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Boeing 747, business cycle, Charles Babbage, computer age, creative destruction, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, index card, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, oil shock, popular electronics, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game
The computer was almost surely an Alto and the principal demonstrators were Goldberg, Tesler, Dan Ingalls, and Diana Merry. Steve Jobs was initially skeptical of what PARC might have to offer but allowed his engineers to convince him otherwise. As for Jobs’s acuity, he later admitted that he was shown three mind-bending innovations at PARC, but the first one was so dazzling it blinded him to the significance of the second and third. Perhaps most important, the Steve Jobs demo was not a random event or a stroke of luck for Apple, as it has sometimes been portrayed. Apple’s engineers knew what they were after. They had taken great pains to plan for the moment, and they arrived at PARC fully prepared to ask the right questions and interpret the answers.
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That sign appeared one day in 1979, when a Silicon Valley legend in the making walked through PARC’s front door. CHAPTER 23 Steve Jobs Gets His Show and Tell Thus we come to Steven P. Jobs. The Apple Computer cofounder’s visit to PARC, from which he reputedly spirited off the ideas that later made the Apple Macintosh famous, is one of the foundation legends of personal computing, as replete with drama and consequence as the story of David and Goliath or the fable of the mouse and the lion with an injured paw. It holds enough material to serve the mythmaking of not one corporation but two, Xerox and Apple. If one seeks proof of its importance, one need look no further than the fact that to this date no two people involved in the episode recollect it quite the same way.
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Because I was the only one there all the time!” Some inconsistencies are the product of Apple’s mythmaking rather than PARC’s. The idea that Steve Jobs and his troops saw in PARC a priceless, squandered gem aims to say as much about Jobs’s peerless perspicacity as Xerox’s obtuseness. The author who wrote, “You can have your Lufthansa Heist, your Great Train Robbery…the slickest trick of all was Apple’s daylight raid on the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center” perhaps desired more to promote a heroic vision of Apple than to get at what really happened. Yet it is possible to resolve all these accounts and reconstruct a story that has never before been told in its entirety.
pages: 382 words: 92,138 The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths by Mariana Mazzucato
"Robert Solow", Apple II, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, circular economy, cleantech, computer age, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demand response, deskilling, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, G4S, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, incomplete markets, information retrieval, intangible asset, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, linear model of innovation, natural language processing, new economy, offshore financial centre, Philip Mirowski, popular electronics, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart grid, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, William Shockley: the traitorous eight
Only about a decade ago Apple was best known for its innovative personal computer design and production. Established on 1 April 1976 in Cupertino, California by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, Apple was incorporated in 1977 by Jobs and Wozniak to sell the Apple I personal computer.1 The company was originally named Apple Computer, Inc. and for 30 years focused on the production of personal computers. On 9 January 2007, the company announced it was removing the ‘Computer’ from its name, reflecting its shift in focus from personal computers to consumer electronics. This same year, Apple launched the iPhone and iPod Touch featuring its new mobile operating system, iOS, which is now used in other Apple products such as the iPad and Apple TV.
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From capacitive sensing to click-wheels As the pioneer of personal computers, Steve Jobs was on his second mission for re-revolutionizing them. His vision for Apple was to prepare the company for the post-computer era, in what he envisioned and often acknowledged in his interviews and media appearances as the new era of the consumer–computer relationship. During an interview at the 2010 D8 conference, Steve Jobs explained his vision of the future for computing by using the analogy of rapid urbanization and its effects on changing consumer views and the need for transportation (Jobs 2010). During his talk, Jobs redefined Apple’s overall strategy as building a family of products around the concept of fragmented computing needs by different uses.
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Besides the communication technologies (discussed in Chapter 4), the iPhone is smart because of features such as the Internet, GPS, a touch-screen display, and the latest new voice activated personal assistant (SIRI). While Steve Jobs was no doubt an inspiring genius worthy of praise, the fact that the iPhone/iPad empire was built on these State-funded technologies provides a far more accurate tale of technological and economic change than what is offered by mainstream discussions. Given the critical role of the State in enabling companies like Apple, it is especially curious that the debate surrounding Apple’s tax avoidance has failed to make this fact more broadly known. Apple must pay tax not only because it is the right thing to do, but because it is the epitome of a company that requires the public purse to be large and risk-loving enough to continue making the investments that entrepreneurs like Jobs will later capitalize on (Mazzucato 2013b).
pages: 252 words: 70,424 The Self-Made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value by John Sviokla, Mitch Cohen
Bear Stearns, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Colonization of Mars, corporate raider, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, global supply chain, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Jony Ive, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megaproject, old-boy network, paper trading, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Virgin Galactic, young professional
He has since founded Vatera Healthcare Partners, a health venture capital firm, and Arisaph Pharmaceuticals, a biotech discovery firm. Steve Jobs 1955–2011, United States Apple Computer, Pixar Jobs was a game designer at Atari when he, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne launched Apple Computer in 1976 to market a personal computer Wozniak had invented. The first Apple PCs proved a huge success, but later products floundered. Infighting led to Jobs’s 1985 ouster. He founded NeXT Computer and bought the Pixar animation studio from George Lucas. Pixar’s 1995 IPO made Jobs a billionaire. Two years later, Apple bought NeXT and reinstated Jobs as CEO, ushering in an era of tremendous innovation and growth driven by the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.
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Compare Boone Pickens’s resiliency to the hesitancy that affected Ron Wayne, an original partner in Apple Computer. Wayne had started a slot machine business that failed, swallowing $50,000 of savings. After that failure he went to work at Atari, where he met Steve Jobs. When Jobs later asked Wayne to join Apple Computer as a third partner to balance and adjudicate between Jobs and the engineering wunderkind Steve Wozniak, Wayne was initially enthusiastic. But then it became clear that they were going to structure the nascent Apple Computer as a partnership. Wayne, who was significantly older than his partners, was worried about the personal liability he would incur if all the borrowing and spending Jobs was doing to manufacture the Apple I at volume did not pan out.
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Such acumen explains how Dietrich Mateschitz was able, as an unknown businessman, to persuade the young Formula 1 driver Gerhard Berger to walk around with a bottle of Red Bull in his hand without having an official endorsement contract. It explains how Steve Jobs—the same man who had been ousted ten years earlier—was able to persuade the leaders of Apple not only to buy NeXT, a company with little in the way of unique technology, but also to reinstate him as Apple’s CEO. And it offers some insight into the history of the Time Warner Center, the jewel in the crown of Stephen Ross’s Related Companies portfolio.14 Redevelopment projects require a strong, name-brand tenant to anchor the deal.
pages: 393 words: 115,217 Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall
accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Astronomia nova, Boeing 747, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edmond Halley, Gary Taubes, hypertext link, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, PageRank, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Solar eclipse in 1919, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, tulip mania, Wall-E, wikimedia commons, yield management
The less-famous history of an ultra-famous icon captures one person’s evolution toward this balance. During Steve Jobs’s first stint at Apple, he called his loonshot group working on the Mac “pirates” or “artists” (he saw himself, of course, as the ultimate pirate-artist). Jobs dismissed the group working on the Apple II franchise as “regular Navy.” The hostility he created between the two groups, by lionizing the artists and belittling the soldiers, was so great that the street between their two buildings was known as the DMZ—the demilitarized zone. The hostility undermined both products. Steve Wozniak, Apple’s cofounder along with Jobs, who was working on the Apple II franchise, left, along with other critical employees; the Mac launch failed commercially; Apple faced severe financial pressure; Jobs was exiled; and John Sculley took over (eventually rescuing the Mac and restoring financial stability).
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A Forbes article stated, “There are very few miracle workers in the business world, and it is now clear that Steve Jobs is not one of them.” WHEN MOSES DOUBLES DOWN The facts of Jobs’s forced exit from Apple in 1985, and his path to the mess at NeXT, have been well laid out. In 1975, Steve Wozniak combined a microprocessor, keyboard, and screen into one of the earliest personal computers. Jobs convinced Wozniak to quit his job and start a company. After some initial success with their Apple I and II, however, competitors quickly passed Apple by. In 1980, Atari and Radio Shack (TRS-80) sold roughly seven times as many computers as Apple. By 1983, Commodore dominated the market, with the IBM PC, launched only two years earlier, a close second.
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The company translated that scientific and manufacturing expertise into products generating over $10 billion in annual sales. It did so, in large part, by balancing loonshots and franchises extraordinarily well. In April 2000, three years after Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he invited Art Levinson to join his new board of directors. After Jobs passed away in 2011, Levinson replaced him as chairman of Apple. RESCUE OPERATIONS The well-told story of Jobs’s return to Apple and its subsequent rise to the most valuable company in the world is a remarkable example of nurturing loonshots, in a race against time, to rescue a franchise in crisis. But it should be, by now, a familiar example.
pages: 325 words: 110,330 Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace
Albert Einstein, business climate, buy low sell high, complexity theory, fail fast, fear of failure, Golden Gate Park, iterative process, Johannes Kepler, Menlo Park, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Wall-E
We’d known from the outset that entering into a relationship with GM and Philips would likely put an end to our dream of making the first animated feature film, but that was a risk no matter who we joined up with: Each investor was going to have its own agenda, and that was the price of our survival. To this day, I am thankful that the deal went south. Because it paved the way for Steve Jobs. I first met Steve in February of 1985, when he was the director of Apple Computer, Inc. Our meeting had been arranged by Apple’s chief scientist, Alan Kay, who knew that Alvy and I were looking for investors to take our graphics division off George’s hands. Alan had been at the U of U with me and at Xerox PARC with Alvy, and he told Steve that he should visit us if he wanted to see the cutting edge in computer graphics.
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A few years ago, when Toyota stumbled—initially failing to acknowledge serious problems with their braking systems, which led to a rare public embarrassment—I remember being struck that a company as smart as Toyota could act in a way that ran so counter to one of its deepest cultural values. Whatever these forces are that make people do dumb things, they are powerful, they are often invisible, and they lurk even in the best of environments. In the late 1980s, while we were building Pixar, Steve Jobs was spending most of his time trying to establish NeXT, the personal computer company he’d started after being forced out at Apple. He came to the Pixar offices only once a year—so rarely, in fact, that we had to give him directions each time so that he wouldn’t get lost. But I was a regular visitor to NeXT. Every few weeks, I’d head down to Steve’s office in Redwood City to brief him on our progress.
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Perhaps they thought that if they asked that question they would come up with something original, that they would remain true to Walt’s pioneering spirit. In fact, this kind of thinking only accomplished the opposite. Because it looked backward, not forward, it tethered the place to the status quo. A pervasive fear of change took root. Steve Jobs was quite aware of this story and used to repeat it to people at Apple, adding that he never wanted people to ask, “What would Steve do?” No one—not Walt, not Steve, not the people of Pixar—ever achieved creative success by simply clinging to what used to work. When I look back on Pixar’s history, I have to recognize that so many of the good things that happened could easily have gone a different way.
pages: 345 words: 92,849 Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality by Don Watkins, Yaron Brook
3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, profit motive, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Uber for X, urban renewal, War on Poverty, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game
The top manager—the CEO—takes the widest perspective and the most long-range time frame. In Apple’s case, Steve Jobs would eventually come to play this role as well. Jobs had been forced to resign from the company he helped to create in 1985, but after a string of bad managers put Apple on the brink of bankruptcy, he returned to the company in 1997 and assumed the position, first, of interim CEO, and then of CEO. Many people at the time thought Apple was done for, its market share torn to shreds by Microsoft. Jobs disagreed. In Jobs’s view, Apple had been destroyed by its previous leaders’ “bringing in corrupt people and corrupt values” and abandoning its commitment to “making great products.”12 To save Apple, Jobs would enact vast changes on both fronts.
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Quoted in Sean Rossman, “Apple’s ‘The Woz’ Talks Jobs, Entrepreneurship,” Tallahassee Democrat, November 6, 2014, http://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/local/2014/11/05/apples-woz-talks-jobs-entrepreneurship/18561425/ (accessed April 13, 2015). 11. Quoted in Alec Hogg, “Apple’s ‘Other’ Steve—Wozniak on Jobs, Starting a Business, Changing the World, and Staying Hungry, Staying Foolish,” BizNews.com, February 17, 2014, http://www.biznews.com/video/2014/02/17/apples-other-steve-wozniak-on-jobs-starting-a-business-changing-the-world/ (accessed April 13, 2015). 12. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), p. 295. 13.
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See Don Watkins, RooseveltCare: How Social Security Is Sabotaging the Land of Self-Reliance (Irvine, CA: Ayn Rand Institute Press, 2014), and Marvin Olasky, The Tragedy of American Compassion (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1992). Chapter 6 1. Jay Yarow and Kamelia Angelova, “CHART OF THE DAY: Apple’s Incredible Run under Steve Jobs,” Business Insider, August 25, 2011, http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-apples-market-cap-during-steve-jobs-tenure-2011-8 (accessed May 28, 2015). 2. JPL, “A Look at Berkshire Hathaway’s Annual Market Returns from 1968–2007,” AllFinancialMatters.com, April 2, 2008, https://web.archive.org/web/20080412003318/http://allfinancialmatters.com/2008/04/02/a-look-at-berkshire-hathaways-annual-market-returns-from-1968-2007/ (accessed May 28, 2015); “Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
pages: 261 words: 79,883 Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek
Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Swan, business cycle, commoditize, hiring and firing, John Markoff, low cost airline, Nick Leeson, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route
“I want to put a ding in the universe,” as Steve Jobs put it. And that’s exactly what Apple does in the industries in which it competes. Apple is born out of its founders’ WHY. There is no difference between one or the other. Apple is just one of the WHATs to Jobs’s and Woz’s WHY. The personalities of Jobs and Apple are exactly the same. In fact, the personalities of all those who are viscerally drawn to Apple are similar. There is no difference between an Apple customer and an Apple employee. One believes in Apple’s WHY and chooses to work for the company, and the other believes in Apple’s WHY and chooses to buy its products.
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In 2003 and 2004, Apple ran a promotion for iTunes with Pepsi—the cola branded as “the choice of the next generation.” It made sense that Apple would do a deal with Pepsi, the primary challenger to Coca-Cola, the status quo. Everything Apple does, everything they say and do, serves as tangible proof of what they believe. The reason I use Apple so extensively throughout this book is that Apple is so disciplined in HOW they do things and so consistent in WHAT they do that, love them or hate them, we all have a sense of their WHY. We know what they believe. Most of us didn’t read books about them. We don’t personally know Steve Jobs. We haven’t spent time roaming the halls of Apple’s headquarters to get to know their culture.
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This is an issue that will have an exponential impact as time passes. Such a departure as Gates’s is not without precedent among companies with equally visionary leaders. Steve Jobs, the physical embodiment of the rabble-rousing revolutionary, a man who also personifies his company’s WHY, left Apple in 1985 after a legendary power struggle with Apple’s president, John Sculley, and the Apple board of directors. The impact on Apple was profound. Originally hired by Jobs in 1983, Sculley was a perfectly capable executive with a proven track record. He know WHAT to do and HOW to do things. He was considered one of the most talented marketing executives around, having risen quickly through the ranks of PepsiCo.
pages: 532 words: 139,706 Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta
23andMe, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, death of newspapers, disintermediation, don't be evil, facts on the ground, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google Earth, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, semantic web, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, spectrum auction, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, Upton Sinclair, X Prize, yield management, zero-sum game
He next became CEO of Intuit when Doerr suggested to founder Scott Cook that Campbell would be a great partner. Four years later, he moved up to chairman of the board. On the eve of Steve Jobs’s return to Apple in 1997, he asked Campbell to join his board. Today Campbell serves as a mentor to some of the Valley’s most successful entrepreneurs, from Marc Andreessen to Steve Jobs, whom he walks and talks with most weekends in Palo Alto, where they are neighbors. He estimates that he spends about 10 percent of his time on Apple business, about 35 percent on Intuit business, an equal amount at Google, about 10 percent as chairman of the board of Columbia University, and the remainder on assorted activities.
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Campbell’s boldness appealed to the ever-rebellious Steve Jobs. The two men bonded. By 1984, said Campbell, “Sculley and Jobs were going at each other already.” Although Jobs had recruited Sculley to bring professional management to Apple, he came to think he was more interested in marketing, including marketing himself, than in Apple products; Sculley believed Jobs wanted an acolyte, not a CEO. Nevertheless, Campbell earned the rare distinction of being able to both befriend Jobs and command Sculley’s respect. Before Sculley succeeded in pushing Jobs out of Apple in 1985, Campbell warned him it would be a huge mistake.
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Neither Seidenberg nor representatives from AT&T or Nokia joined in Google’s November announcement of the first truly open mobile operating system. A traditional Google corporate ally, Steve Jobs, also did not join because Apple’s iPhone provides a mobile operating system, one less open than Google’s. This was a little clumsy, because half of Apple’s eight directors serve as Google directors or advisers, among them Eric Schmidt, Bill Campbell, and Al Gore. At Apple board meetings, Schmidt told me he now recused himself from mobile phone discussions. In the auction, that commenced in January, all bidders were instructed not to reveal their bids.
pages: 327 words: 102,322 Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry by Jacquie McNish, Sean Silcoff
Albert Einstein, Clayton Christensen, corporate governance, diversified portfolio, indoor plumbing, Iridium satellite, Jeff Hawkins, junk bonds, Marc Benioff, Michael Milken, PalmPilot, patent troll, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, the new new thing
By that day, it had already inspired more than 11,000 print articles and generated 69 million Google hits.7 No one understood consumers’ digital desires better than Steve Jobs. A generation earlier Apple’s elegant Macintosh took desktop computers mainstream. Six years before the iPhone launch, Apple reinvented the music business in the face of industry skepticism by making portable music easy and fun with the iPod digital music player and its iTunes online music service. Computer and music industry executives dismissed iTunes as a pipe dream. Record labels would not initially yield to Apple the right to control the online distribution of music purchases, but eventually relented.8 They were wrong. Apple offered a lifeline to a drowning business, and Jobs appealed personally to artists hurt by Internet music pirates, including Bob Dylan, who agreed to let iTunes prerelease his new album Modern Times.9 For the first time in thirty years, a Dylan album ranked number one on the Billboard chart.
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Rubin’s Dream touch-screen phone was moved into the fast lane.5 Fred Vogelstein summed up iPhone’s impact that day in his book Dogfight with a quote by Google engineer Chris DeSalvo: “We’re going to have to start over.” 6 Mike Lazaridis was home on his treadmill when he saw a TV report about Apple’s news. He soon forgot about exercise. There was Steve Jobs waving a small glass object, downloading music, videos, and maps from the Internet onto a phone. “How did they do that?” Lazaridis wondered. His curiosity turned to disbelief when Sigman took the stage to announce Cingular’s deal to sell Apple’s phone. What was its parent, AT&T, thinking? “It’s going to collapse the network,” he thought. The next day Lazaridis grabbed Balsillie at the office and pulled him in front of a computer.
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By early 2010, RIM had a plan to produce a tablet with a seven-inch-long screen—small enough to fit in a coat pocket or purse—with a high-quality, high-definition screen, a fast browser, a sharp camera, and great sound. The device would be called PlayBook. But Apple once again set the agenda when Steve Jobs unveiled its tablet in late January 2010. With its ten-inch multitouch screen, familiar features including iTunes, a full browser, and lots of apps, plus an electronic reader, all wrapped in an elegant and accessible design, the Apple iPad would become one of the fastest-selling electronic devices ever when it hit the market that April. One of the iPad’s strengths was that it looked like a larger iPod or iPhone, complete with the all-glass screen and a single home button, but it was better suited to applications that called for a larger screen, including games, watching movies, and reading.
pages: 410 words: 101,260 Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant
Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bluma Zeigarnik, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, double helix, Elon Musk, emotional labour, fear of failure, Firefox, George Santayana, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, The Wisdom of Crowds, women in the workforce
The Road Not Taken Donna Dubinsky was just shy of thirty, and it was the most hectic time of her life. As Apple’s distribution and sales manager in 1985, she was working virtually nonstop from morning until bedtime, maniacally focused on shipping computers to keep up with explosive demand. Suddenly, Steve Jobs proposed eliminating all six U.S. warehouses, dropping their inventory, and moving to a just-in-time production system in which computers would be assembled upon order and overnighted by FedEx. Dubinsky thought this was a colossal mistake, one that could put the company’s entire future in jeopardy. “In my mind, Apple being successful depended on distribution being successful,” she says.
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Washington, “Can an Agentic Black Woman Get Ahead? The Impact of Race and Interpersonal Dominance on Perceptions of Female Leaders,” Psychological Science 23 (2012): 354–58. “Apple being successful depended on”: Personal interview with Donna Dubinsky, June 20, 2014; Todd D. Jick and Mary Gentile, “Donna Dubinsky and Apple Computer, Inc. (A),” Harvard Business School, Case 9-486-083, December 11, 1995. Jobs promoted every one of them: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013). “Voice feeds” : Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).
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Eventually, a major cardinal learned of his work and wrote a letter encouraging Copernicus to publish it. Even then, Copernicus stalled for four more years. His magnum opus only saw the light of day after a young mathematics professor took matters into his own hands and submitted it for publication. Almost half a millennium later, when an angel investor offered $250,000 to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to bankroll Apple in 1977, it came with an ultimatum: Wozniak would have to leave Hewlett-Packard. He refused. “I still intended to be at that company forever,” Wozniak reflects. “My psychological block was really that I didn’t want to start a company. Because I was just afraid,” he admits. Wozniak changed his mind only after being encouraged by Jobs, multiple friends, and his own parents.
pages: 413 words: 119,587 Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff
"Robert Solow", A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deskilling, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game
When originally completed, it served as a research and development center, but as Apple scaled down after Sculley left in 1993, it became a fortress for an increasingly besieged company. When Steve Jobs returned, first as “iCEO” in 1997, there were many noticeable changes including a dramatic improvement in the cafeteria food. The fine silver that had marked the executive suite during the brief era when semiconductor chief Gilbert Amelio ran the company also disappeared. As his health declined during a battle with pancreatic cancer in 2011, Steve Jobs came back for one last chapter at Apple. He had taken his third medical leave, but he was still the guiding force at the company.
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Instead, the Knowledge Navigator envisioned a natural conversation with an intelligent machine that both recognized and synthesized human speech. Brought to Apple as chief executive during the personal computing boom, Sculley started his tenure in 1983 with a well-chronicled romance with Apple’s cofounder Steve Jobs. Later, when the company’s growth stalled in the face of competition from IBM and others, Sculley fought Jobs for control of the company, and won. However, in 1986, Jobs launched a new computer company, NeXT. Jobs wanted to make beautiful workstations for college students and faculty researchers. That placed pressure on Sculley to demonstrate that Apple could still innovate without its original visionary.
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When word circulated that the firm had been acquired, possibly for more than $200 million, it sent shock waves up and down Sand Hill Road and within the burgeoning “app economy” that the iPhone had spawned. After Apple acquired Siri, the program was immediately pulled from the App Store, the iPhone service through which programs were screened and sold, and the small team of programmers who had designed Siri vanished back into “stealth mode” inside the Cupertino campus. The larger implications of the acquisition weren’t immediately obvious to many in the Valley, but as one of his last acts as the leader of Apple, Steve Jobs had paved the way for yet another dramatic shift in the way humans would interact with computers.
pages: 286 words: 87,401 Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh
activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, Firefox, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, yellow journalism
We’ll examine both of these key moves in greater detail later in the book, with Facebook’s shift to mobile featured in our analysis of Facebook’s business model, and Facebook’s hiring of Sheryl Sandberg in the section on the key transition from contributors to managers to executives. Apple illustrates how this overlap looks over multiple decades. In its storied history, Apple went through complete scaling cycles for the Apple II, the Macintosh, the iMac, and the iPod (with the cycle for the iPhone still under way). It’s worth noting that Apple failed to launch any blitzscalable products after the Apple II and the Mac until Steve Jobs returned and launched the iMac, iPod, and iPhone. It was part of Steve’s rare genius that time and time again he was able to pick the right product for Apple to blitzscale, even without slowing down for a period of classic start-up growth to gather feedback from the market.
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If the company doesn’t realize the root cause, the most common (and unhelpful) response is to call for changing the CEO or the executive team—the VP of sales is particularly vulnerable because he or she often takes the blame for the slowdown—or both. How many times does replacing the CEO actually reignite massive growth? The only good example we can think of is what Steve Jobs did at Apple. So if you have a Steve Jobs waiting in the wings, go ahead and switch CEOs. Otherwise, it probably won’t help. Consider what happened to two blitzscalers who ran out of headroom—Groupon and Twitter. Groupon was one of the fastest-growing companies of all time, thanks to its leadership position in the rapidly-emerging daily deals market.
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Many of Google’s services are strong enough to succeed on their own, but this means that they are succeeding in spite of, rather than because of, multithreading. In contrast, Apple’s highly centralized approach allows it to produce highly integrated and polished products, but, as a result, it restricts itself to a much smaller product line. Of course, this is intentional; Steve Jobs always wanted to run as close to single-threaded as possible to maintain Apple’s unity of purpose. One of the first things Steve did when he returned to Apple as CEO in 1997 was to reduce the company’s product line from dozens to a simple two-by-two matrix: consumer desktop, pro desktop, consumer laptop, and pro laptop.
The Big Score by Michael S. Malone
Apple II, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, creative destruction, Donner party, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, game design, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, lone genius, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, packet switching, plutocrats, RAND corporation, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yom Kippur War
For Jobs, any son of a bitch who charged him too much for a part or didn’t like him personally or who competed with Apple—that is, with Steve Jobs—deserved whatever evil befell him. This was a dumb strategy when Apple was small, and even dumber when it grew large. Luckily, Jobs’s subordinates knew better, and it became standard operating procedure to simply sneak in the back door contracts with his latest set of enemies in order to keep the assembly lines running. Meanwhile, as Jobs was undergoing the transition to adulthood, Apple continued to grow at a frantic pace. The finished Apple II was a magnificent machine. Inside was Wozniak’s masterful design, which required only 62 chips (compared with hundreds in other personal computers).
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Late one evening, after 20 hours of work, one executive turned to a poster on the wall showing a still from the now-famous Macintosh 1984 commercial and punched it down, yelling, “You want to know where Big Brother really is? It’s not at IBM. It’s right here.” Meanwhile, Steve Jobs smirked and relaxed by sticking his bare feet in a flushing company toilet. Yet Apple had become too big even for Steve Jobs to ruin. With Markkula, then Sculley, at the controls, presiding over a growing professional middle management, Apple grew up. Jobs aside, it became a good, solid place to work, with extended career paths and professionalism that instilled employee loyalty. There were no more Nights of the Long Knives and fewer mercurial, unpredictable bosses—except Jobs. Much of the funkiness and flash were gone, but so was the amateurishness and the risky company swings.
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At meetings they would begin talking to one another, ignoring everyone else, riffing off each other’s thoughts, anticipating the other’s ideas before they were said, speaking almost in a private language. Yet there were those Apple managers who looked in Sculley’s eyes and saw the shrewdest of businessmen, a chameleon with a color so pure that even Steve Jobs couldn’t see past it to the real John Sculley inside. Apple had at last become a serious company. But it was almost too late. 1983 was a watershed year in the personal computer market. Most of the computer companies on the market recognized the inevitable and offered IBM software-compatible equipment—except Apple. IBM further consolidated its control of the market with the PC and a more powerful version called the PCxt, which as good as obliterated the poor Apple III and stole the lower end of Lisa’s market.
pages: 781 words: 226,928 Commodore: A Company on the Edge by Brian Bagnall
Apple II, belly landing, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Firefox, game design, Gary Kildall, index card, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Ken Thompson, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, packet switching, pink-collar, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Ted Nelson
According to Wozniak, “We went to Commodore and talked primarily with Andre Sousan. Steve Jobs was trying to talk Commodore into buying the Apple II for a large amount, like hundreds of thousands of dollars. … Steve Jobs also wanted Commodore to hire us along with the proposed deal. The deal was never on paper and never concrete, as to how much.” “The discussions never got beyond a meeting with Jack and Steve,” says Peddle. “Jack’s view was that Steve wanted much too much for the company and in the fall of 1976 he was right. I remember him laughing about Steve Jobs and his view of his company’s position.” Tramiel was willing to purchase Apple, but he wanted the lowest price possible.
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Wozniak also created six expansion slots for his improved Apple. This brought it up to date with the functionality available to other computers, including the Altair and the KIM-4 expansion module. In October, Peddle approached Apple in the hopes of acquiring Wozniak’s technology. “We tried to get them to sell us the Apple … as the basis for our PET,” says Peddle. The person negotiating on behalf of Apple was Steve Jobs. The two partners came to Commodore headquarters with the intention of selling their fledgling company. “Andre sets up a meeting with Apple to have a discussion about how we could get to the CES show together,” recalls Peddle.
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In August 1978, Apple came to Peddle in search of a head engineer. “Jack * me up and Steve [Jobs] came to me with a great offer,” recalls Peddle. And what was the job offer? “To replace Woz and be the technical guru for the company.” Apple used everything in their power to lure Peddle. “I met with [Mike] Scott and Steve [Jobs],” says Peddle. “Basically the guys at Apple offered me a deal that would have made me one of the top five stockholders at Apple.” The offer was too attractive to decline. “I guess he’d just had it,” says Seiler. “He was always fighting with Jack Tramiel. There were always differences about how the business should be run. Jack was cheap.
pages: 315 words: 99,065 The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership by Richard Branson
barriers to entry, Boeing 747, call centre, carbon footprint, Celtic Tiger, clean water, collective bargaining, Costa Concordia, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, flag carrier, friendly fire, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, index card, inflight wifi, Lao Tzu, legacy carrier, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, trade route, Virgin Galactic, zero-sum game
It did stick with me, however, that to take their show on the road, even a megabrand like McDonald’s can, on occasion, be forced to ‘think outside the bun’. APPLE SEEDS SALES Another brand that is anything but typical in its approach to every element of doing business is Apple. Steve Jobs’ fanaticism for product design and detail was (and still is) seamlessly visible all the way from technical form and function to packaging to the Apple Stores. And boy, has it ever paid off – there is nothing remotely ‘average’ about an Apple Store. I find the shopping experience there to be a disarming cross between visiting an art gallery and some form of an electronics exhibition that has been stripped of everything but the coolest and best the business has to offer.
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This means as few walls as possible – real and imaginary. It also calls for leaders that are out there getting their hands dirty every day. Steve Jobs put it perfectly when he said to his biographer Walter Isaacson, ‘Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say “Wow” and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.’ MEET ME IN THE PIAZZA Collaboration should have been Steve Jobs’ middle name as he was forever going to amazing ends to foster it – and not just at Apple. When he created Pixar, home to Toy Story, Monsters Inc. and many other animated classics, he went to great lengths to make unplanned collaboration part of the company’s foundations – literally!
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A counterpoint to my friend Antonio’s story is that of Ronald Wayne. Wayne had worked alongside Steve Jobs at Atari and became one of the co-founders of Apple with Jobs and Wozniak. At forty years of age, Wayne was almost twice as old as his young co-founders and so he agreed to essentially act as the venture’s ‘adult supervisor’ in return for which he was given a ten per cent stake in the nascent company. Among other things Wayne drew up the partnership agreement between the three, drafted the first company logo and wrote the Apple 1 manual. For a variety of reasons, however, Wayne just didn’t feel comfortable that things were going to work out – he also didn’t particularly enjoy working with Jobs – and so after only a couple of months Wayne called it quits and relinquished his stock in the company for a one-time pay-out of $800.
pages: 167 words: 49,719 Goodbye, Things: The New Japanese Minimalism by Fumio Sasaki
Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Lao Tzu, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Skype, Steve Jobs
Minimalism imported back to Japan The American company Apple has an intriguing connection to the minimalist culture of Japan. Many minimalists are fond of Apple products and of Apple’s founder, Steve Jobs. The products that Jobs created always avoided excess. The iPhone only has one button, and you don’t have to worry about being stuck with a lot of extra wires and ports when you buy a Mac. Apple products generally don’t include operating manuals. I think this is all due to the fact that Jobs had been a minimalist, and he was known to be a believer in Japanese Zen, which teaches minimalism. It’s quite well-known that Steve Jobs considered Master Kobun Otogawa of the Soto school his master and had at one point seriously considered studying Zen at the temple Eiheiji, located deep in the mountains on the coast of the Sea of Japan.
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To him, scoring is his top priority. He’s reduced everything else to save his energy and focus on what’s truly important: those crucial opportunities to score. Steve Jobs, the perfect minimalist Steve Jobs was not a minimalist simply because he always wore the same thing and removed excess from his products. Minimalism really did guide almost everything he did. The first thing that Jobs is said to have done after making his comeback to Apple was to donate old documents and machines that were almost covered by cobwebs to a museum. He started out by parting with material objects. He wanted to focus on producing products that would change the world, so he got rid of everything else that wasn’t important.
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Those at Toppan Printing who printed this book, everyone at National Bookbinding who put this work together, those of you at ALEX Corporation who handled the desktop publishing, the people at Tokyo Shuppan Service Center who were responsible for the proofreading, and the people at Taiyo Shoji for always transporting our heavy loads of books—thank you all very much. And last but not least, many thanks to the people who serve as our agents and those of you at the wonderful bookstores. I hope you’ll continue to offer this book to our readers. I’d also like to thank Steve Jobs and Apple. It’s because of the iPhone and MacBook Air, two truly minimalist products that Mr. Jobs introduced to the world, that I’ve been able to say goodbye to so many of my material possessions, while also being able to write at any location. It’s thanks to Microsoft Word that I was able to write this.
pages: 56 words: 16,788 The New Kingmakers by Stephen O'Grady
AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, David Heinemeier Hansson, DevOps, Hacker News, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Netflix Prize, Paul Graham, Ruby on Rails, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, Y Combinator
Here are five businesses that, in at least one area, understood the importance of developers and engaged appropriately. Apple In August 2011, a month after reporting record earnings, Apple surpassed Exxon as the world’s biggest company by market capitalization. This benchmark was reached in part because of fluctuations in oil price that affected Exxon’s valuation, but there’s little debate that Apple is ascendant. By virtually any metric, Steve Jobs’s second tenure at Apple has turned into one of the most successful in history, in any industry. Seamlessly moving from hit product to hit product, the Apple of 2012 looks nothing like the Apple of the late nineties, when Dell CEO Michael Dell famously suggested that Apple should be shut down, to “give the money back to the shareholders.”
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Even its forgotten desktop business is showing steady if unspectacular growth. There are many factors contributing to Apple’s remarkable success, from the brilliance of the late Steve Jobs to the supply chain sophistication of current CEO Tim Cook. And of course, Apple’s success is itself fueling more success. In the tablet market, for example, would-be competitors face not only the daunting task of countering Apple’s unparalleled hardware and software design abilities, but the economies of scale that allow Apple to buy components more cheaply than anyone else. The perfect storm of Apple’s success is such that some analysts are forecasting that it could become the world’s first trillion-dollar company.
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What led 42Floors to this decision? In their own words, “The very best can’t be hired. They must be courted.” For perhaps the first time in the history of the industry, people are worth more than the code they produce, a valuation supported by logic. Steve Jobs believed that an elite talent was 25 times more valuable to Apple than an average alternative. For Jobs, this was critical to Apple’s resurgence: That’s probably…certainly the secret to my success. It’s that we’ve gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg agrees, saying in a 2010 interview: Someone who is exceptional in their role is not just a little better than someone who is pretty good.
pages: 380 words: 118,675 The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone
airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, buy and hold, call centre, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, fulfillment center, game design, housing crisis, invention of movable type, inventory management, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, late fees, loose coupling, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, quantitative hedge fund, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Rodney Brooks, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Skype, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, zero-sum game
He sagely recommended to the board members that they stick with their founder. Galli says that the final decision to leave Amazon was his own. Before he joined the company, he had read the book Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple, by John Sculley, who had joined Apple as CEO in the mid-1980s and then ousted Steve Jobs in a boardroom coup. “Before I went out there, I promised myself and my family that I would never do to Jeff what Sculley did to Steve Jobs,” Galli says. “I just felt like Jeff was falling in love more and more with his vision and what the company could be. I could anticipate it was not going to work. He wanted to have a more hands-on role.
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Over his years at the helm of Apple, Steve Jobs usually reviled those former colleagues who had defected from his company and abandoned its righteous mission. Though Diego Piacentini left Apple for a startup that Jobs had incredulously dismissed as just a retailer, the two remained unusually cordial, perhaps because Piacentini had given Apple six months to find his replacement as head of European operations. Jobs would occasionally contact Piacentini when he needed something from Amazon, and in early 2003, Piacentini e-mailed his former boss with a request of his own. Amazon wanted to make Apple a proposal. Piacentini brought Neil Roseman and H.
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I had to roll up my sleeves and start all over again.” He’s now a life coach living in Barcelona, Spain. Diego Piacentini, a new executive from Apple, was thrust directly into the mess. Bezos hired the suave, Italian-born Piacentini in early 2000 to take the top spot running Amazon’s international operations. Piacentini’s old boss Steve Jobs had expressed incredulity at the move in his typically strident way. Over lunch in the Apple cafeteria in Cupertino, Jobs asked Piacentini why he would possibly want to go to a boring retailer when Apple was in the process of reinventing computing. Then in the same breath, Jobs suggested that maybe the career move revealed that Piacentini was so dumb that it was a good thing he was leaving Apple.
pages: 935 words: 197,338 The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby
23andMe, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, Bob Noyce, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cleantech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator
The fertility of the network was illustrated by the story of Apple, founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. On the face of it, Apple was an obvious candidate for venture investment, because scores of insiders already understood that the personal computer would be the next big thing in technology. Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, had recognized the PC as “an idea whose time has arrived” and had produced a prototype complete with mouse and graphical interface. Intel and National Semiconductor had considered making a PC, and Steve Wozniak had twice offered the Apple I design to his employer, Hewlett-Packard.[1] But all four companies had decided not to build a PC, inhibited by what the business thinker Clayton Christensen termed the “innovator’s dilemma.”
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All four companies had too much of a stake in the status quo to risk disrupting it. A startup that filled the resulting vacuum looked like an obvious bet for venture capitalists. And yet when Apple set out to raise money, the stars in the venture-capital firmament failed to recognize the opportunity, proving that even the most brilliant VCs are capable of costly errors. Tom Perkins and Eugene Kleiner refused even to meet with Steve Jobs. Bill Draper of Sutter Hill sent an associate to visit Apple, and when the associate reported that Jobs and Wozniak had kept him waiting, Draper wrote them off as arrogant.[2] Meanwhile, Draper’s old SBIC partner, Pitch Johnson, wondered, “How can you use a computer at home?
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At a telling point in their courtship, Yang asked Moritz if the company should change its name, maybe to something more serious. Moritz retorted that if Yang did that, Sequoia would not back him.[10] Moreover, Moritz had a rationale for his retort—one that Yang himself had never thought of. In his years as a journalist, Moritz had written a perceptive book about Steve Jobs. Now he insisted that Yahoo was that precious thing, an inspired and memorable company name. Like Apple.[11] Whether by instinct or cunning, Moritz had given the perfect clincher of an answer. Because he understood Jobs as well as anybody in the Valley, he had the credibility to imply a connection between two unknown grad students and a storied Silicon Valley legend.
pages: 276 words: 78,094 Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty by David Kadavy
Airbnb, complexity theory, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Hacker News, Isaac Newton, John Gruber, Paul Graham, Ruby on Rails, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, web application, wikimedia commons, Y Combinator
There is no better example of a company that enjoys a heavier advantage thanks to its design than Apple. In 1997, Steve Jobs – upon returning to the company after a 12-year absence – discovered the under-appreciated design laboratory of Jonathan Ives. Since then, Apple has released innovative products with great design time and time again, enjoying tremendous success. It’s grown to be the largest tech company in the world, at as much as 100 times its own size in 1997. Apple has accomplished this success by releasing one great product after another, but it owes its growth to one product above all others: the iPod. Before the iPod, contact with the elegance of Apple’s design was reserved for its relatively small group of extremely dedicated followers.
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Since Microsoft Office was such a dominant software program, so important to doing business, getting people to switch to a Mac was nearly impossible. So, Apple went for a more emotional point by attacking music. “Music is a part of everyone’s life. Everyone. Music has been around forever. It will always be around,” Steve Jobs said as he introduced the iPod in 2001. People had been listening to music on their computers for a few years at that time, but the portable digital player market was just emerging. Many of the players that were on the market at the time of the iPod’s introduction were bulky, difficult to transfer music to, and had interfaces that were “unbelievably awful,” as Steve Jobs put it. Apple had an opportunity to get one of its products into the hands of consumers more easily than it could a personal computer, and it seized that opportunity with the iPod.
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Gastev (http://www.flickr.com/photos/gastev/) The height of Roman typography The influence of the brush even found its way into lettering carved in marble, such as in the base of Trajan’s Column, which is considered the height of Roman typography. Though there is subtlety in the lettering that, as Apple CEO Steve Jobs has said of calligraphy, is “beautiful in a way that science can’t capture,” the general “skeleton” of the letters is based upon the square, the triangle, and the circle (see Figure 3-14). Figure 3-14 The theoretical underpinnings of Roman capitals: the square, the circle, and the triangle.
pages: 304 words: 93,494 Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton
4chan, Airbus A320, Big Tech, Burning Man, friendly fire, index card, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, PalmPilot, pets.com, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technology bubble, traveling salesman, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks
The tech blogs, now believing that Jack had founded and built Twitter on his own, that he had come up with the idea when he was just a child—which Jack insinuated to dozens of media outlets—and that he possessed the same principles as Jobs in both design and management, started asking: “Is Jack Dorsey the next Steve Jobs?” (They inevitably answered: “Yes.”) It wasn’t a grand master plan by Jack to copy Jobs. Rather it was dozens of little plans that added up to a re-creation. In many respects it was Steve Jobs who helped create Jack Dorsey. Jobs was notorious for denying access to reporters. He had trained the media to behave exactly how he wanted them to—when he spoke, they listened, which was his best magic trick of all. So when he took a leave from Apple after falling ill in 2009, the media went in search of the next Steve Jobs. Jack walked like that duck, used the same quotes as that duck, wore the same glasses, had the same principles, and the same astounding theories on design as that duck.
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Everyone else, now seated, started giggling at them. But worse than the anarchy inside was the fact that Apple Computer had recently torn a hole in the hull of the company. On a Tuesday morning several months earlier, Odeo employees had gathered around their computers to watch Steve Jobs, the venerable CEO of Apple, announce the latest iPod. But stunned silence had enveloped them when Jobs declared that Apple was adding podcasts to iTunes. At the end of the announcements, the tech giant sent a brief press release across the news wires with the ominous headline, APPLE TAKES PODCASTING MAINSTREAM. In that brief moment podcasting, which had been the entire company thesis for Odeo, had become a simple add-on for Apple.
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He referred to “rounding the edges” in design meetings, a term Jobs began using in 1981 when he designed the Macintosh operation system. He set up the same weekly schedule for product meetings at Square that Jobs had commanded at Apple. And he started using Jobs quotes in his own speeches. Then Jack started hiring former Apple employees at Square. But their interviews were different from those of other candidates. “Did you have the opportunity to work with Steve Jobs?” Jack would ask. “Can you tell me a little about his management style?” During discussions with former Apple employees who had been hired at Square, Jack heard that Jobs didn’t consider himself a CEO but rather an “editor.” At some point Jack started referring to himself as “the editor, not just the CEO” of Square.
pages: 359 words: 110,488 Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou
Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bioinformatics, corporate governance, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Google Chrome, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, obamacare, Ponzi scheme, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Travis Kalanick, ubercab, Wayback Machine
Campbell, “Rainbow Makers,” Chemistry World, June 1, 2003. 3. APPLE ENVY In January of that year: John Markoff, “Apple Introduces Innovative Cellphone,” New York Times, January 9, 2007. One of them was Ana Arriola: Ana used to be a man named George. She transitioned from male to female after she worked at Theranos. “We have lost sight of our business objective”: Email with the subject line “IT” sent by Justin Maxwell to Ana Arriola in the early morning hours of September 20, 2007. Avie was one of Steve Jobs’s oldest: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 259, 300, 308.
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Christian and his friends were always ready and willing to do Elizabeth and Sunny’s bidding. Their eagerness to please was on display when news broke that Steve Jobs had died on the evening of October 5, 2011. Elizabeth and Sunny wanted to pay Jobs a tribute by flying an Apple flag at half-mast on the grounds of the Hillview Avenue building. The next morning, Jeff Blickman, a tall redhead who’d played varsity baseball at Duke, volunteered for the mission. He couldn’t locate any suitable Apple flag for sale, so Blickman had one custom made out of vinyl. It featured the famous Apple logo in white against a black background. The store he went to took a while to make it.
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The lawyers weren’t of much help when he asked them, so he looked up Food and Drug Administration regulations on his own and decided that a “for research use only” sticker was probably the most appropriate. This was not a finished product and no one should be under the impression that it was, Tony thought. | THREE | Apple Envy For a young entrepreneur building a business in the heart of Silicon Valley, it was hard to escape the shadow of Steve Jobs. By 2007, Apple’s founder had cemented his legend in the technology world and in American society at large by bringing the computer maker back from the ashes with the iMac, the iPod, and the iTunes music store. In January of that year, he unveiled his latest and biggest stroke of genius, the iPhone, before a rapturous audience at the Macworld conference in San Francisco.
pages: 265 words: 70,788 The Wide Lens: What Successful Innovators See That Others Miss by Ron Adner
ASML, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, call centre, Clayton Christensen, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, M-Pesa, minimum viable product, mobile money, new economy, RAND corporation, RFID, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs
CNET.com, July 12, 2002, http://news.cnet.com/2100-1040-943519.xhtml. 210 iPod, boasting 100 million customers: Steven Levy, “Why We Went Nuts About the iPhone,” Newsweek, July 16, 2007. 210 Apple’s stock shot up 44 percent: Matt Krantz, “iPhone Powers up Apple’s Shares,” USA Today, June 28, 2007. 211 “four times the number of PCs that ship every year”: Morris, “Steve Jobs Speaks Out.” 211 Ericsson released the R380: Dave Conabree, “Ericsson Introduces the New R380e,” Mobile Magazine, September 25, 2001. 211 Palm followed up with its version: Sascha Segan, “Kyocera Launches First Smartphone in Years,” PC Magazine, March 23, 2010, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2361664,00.asp#fbid=C81SVwKJIvh. 211 “one more entrant into an already very busy space”: “RIM Co-CEO Doesn’t See Threat from Apple’s iPhone,” InformationWeek, February 12, 2007. 212 the phone was exclusively available from only one carrier: In a handful of markets regulators ruled the exclusivity arrangement illegal. 212 “The bigger problem is the AT&T network”: David Pogue, “The iPhone Matches Most of Its Hype,” New York Times, June 27, 2007. 212 priced at a mere $99 in 2007: Kim Hart, “Rivals Ready for iPhone’s Entrance; Pricey Gadget May Alter Wireless Field,” Washington Post, June 24, 2007. 212 “cause irreparable damage to the iPhone’s software”: Apple, press release, September 24, 2007. 213 “I say I like our strategy”: Steve Ballmer interviewed on CNBC, January 17, 2007. 213 They ran out of the older model six weeks before the July 2008 launch: Tom Krazit, “The iPhone, One Year Later,” CNET.com, June 26, 2008, http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-9977572-37.xhtml. 213 60 percent went to buyers who already owned at least one iPod: Apple COO Tim Cook’s comments at Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference, cited in JPMorgan analyst report, “Strolling Through the Apple Orchard: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Scenarios,” March 4, 2008. 215 the average iPhone user paid AT&T $2,000: Jenna Wortham, “Customers Angered as iPhones Overload AT&T,” New York Times, September 2, 2009. 215 as high as $18 per user per month: Tom Krazit, “Piper Jaffray: AT&T Paying Apple $18 per iPhone, Per Month,” CNET.com, October 24, 2007, http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-9803657-37.xhtml. 216 Apple announced its 10 billionth app download: Apple.com, “iTunes Store Tops 10 Billion Songs Sold,” February 25, 2010, http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/02/25iTunes-Store-Tops-10-Billion-Songs-Sold.xhtml. Accessed October 20, 2011. 219 financial analysts, technology blogs, and the mainstream media were already obsessed: James Quinn, “Apple’s ‘Tablet’ to rival Amazon’s Kindle,” Daily Telegraph (London), May 22, 2009. 219 “Apple’s latest billion-dollar jackpot”: David Smith, “Steve Jobs’ New Trick: The Apple Tablet,” Observer, August 23, 2009. 219 “2010 Could be the Year of the Tablet”: Nick Bilton, “2010 Could be the Year of the Tablet,” New York Times, December 28, 2009. 219 “already 75 million people who know how to use this”: Joshua Topolosky, “Live from the Apple ‘Latest Creation’ Event,” Engadget.com, January 27, 2010. 219 all committed to providing books for the device: Ibid. 219 daily version of the paper specially tailored for iPad users: Andy Brett, “The New York Times Introduces an iPad App,” TechCrunch, April 1, 2010, http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/01/new-york-times-ipad/.
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The iPod Wins, Three Years Late The MP3 player market did eventually consolidate around a dominant product, Apple’s iPod. But the iPod, launched in late 2001—three years after the MPMan—was anything but a first mover. How can we understand the iPod’s success despite its delayed entry? In 1997, the late Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the company he had co-founded as a college dropout, as interim CEO. As the Internet bubble grew, Apple was hungry for growth. Only a sliver of computer users had embraced its Mac offering. In 2001, Jobs noted: “Apple has about 5 percent market share today. Most of the other 95 percent of computer buyers don’t even consider us.”
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But its approach is timeless. iPod: Staged Expansion While the 1990s were rocky for former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, in the new century it seemed he could do no wrong. In chapter 6 we saw how Jobs constructed the iPod ecosystem. For his minimum viable ecosystem he carried over two elements from the Macintosh world—the Apple Store and the iTunes music management software—and waited for the other key elements—broadband and content—to arrive before he introduced his MP3 player into the marketplace. In 2001, the iPod player was rolled out. The MVE was in place. Apple’s first expansion of the iPod ecosystem came with the rollout of the iTunes music store in 2003, which offered consumers an easy way to purchase legal digital music.
pages: 59 words: 15,958 Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur by Derek Sivers
business process, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs
We all went into a little presentation room, not knowing what to expect. Then out came Steve Jobs. Whoa! Wow. He was in full persuasive presentation mode—trying to convince all of us to give Apple our entire catalog of music, talking about iTunes’ success so far, and all the reasons we should work with Apple. He made a point of saying, “We want the iTunes Music Store to have every piece of music ever recorded. Even if it’s discontinued or not selling much, we want it all.” This was huge to me, because until 2003, independent musicians were always denied access to the big outlets. For Apple to sell all music, not just music from artists who had signed their rights away to a corporation—this was amazing!
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But there was one problem. iTunes wasn’t getting back to us. Yahoo!, Rhapsody, Napster, and the rest were all up and running. But iTunes wasn’t returning our signed contract. Was it because I had posted my meeting notes? Had I pissed off Steve Jobs? Nobody at Apple would say anything. It had been months. My musicians were getting impatient and angry. I gave optimistic apologies, but I was starting to get worried, too. A month later, Steve Jobs did a special worldwide simulcast keynote speech about iTunes. People had been criticizing iTunes for having less music than the competition. They had 400,000 songs, while Rhapsody and Napster had more than 2 million songs.
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When you sign up to run a marathon, you don’t want a taxi to take you to the finish line. The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote In May 2003, Apple invited me to their headquarters to discuss getting CD Baby’s catalog into the iTunes Music Store. iTunes had just launched two weeks before, with only some music from the major labels. Many of us in the music biz—especially those who had seen companies like eMusic use this exact same model for years without much success—were not sure this idea was going to work. I flew to Cupertino, California, thinking I’d be meeting with one of Apple’s marketing or tech people. When I arrived, I found out that about a hundred people from small record labels and distributors had also been invited.
pages: 383 words: 81,118 Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms by David S. Evans, Richard Schmalensee
Airbnb, Alvin Roth, big-box store, business process, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Lyft, M-Pesa, market friction, market microstructure, Max Levchin, mobile money, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Victor Gruen, Wayback Machine, winner-take-all economy
See Jay Yarow, “Google Is Reportedly Trying to Get a Bigger Slice of Android App Revenue,” Business Insider, June 28, 2013, http://www.businessinsider.com/google-play-store-revenue-2013-6; Vogelstein, Dogfight, 121. 42. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 500–502. 43. Arnold Kim, “Steve Jobs Announces Third Party SDK for iPhone for February 2008,” MacRumors, October 17, 2007, http://www.macrumors.com/2007/10/17/steve-jobs-announces-3rd-party-sdk-for-iphone-for-february-2008/; Apple Hot News (archived October 18, 2007), “Third Party Applications on the iPhone,” Internet Archive Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20071018221832/ http://www.apple.com/hotnews/. 44. Nielsen Informate, “International Smartphone Mobility Report,” March 2015, http://informatemi.com/final_download_report.php?
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He couldn’t get the company to approve a mobile phone app because it would cannibalize its thirty-year-old legacy technology.25 The Symbian experience showed Apple and Google that just starting a two-sided platform and securing customers on both sides wouldn’t be enough. The platform would also have to nurture a healthy ecosystem around it. Symbian couldn’t do that. If anything, Symbian contributed to making its ecosystem more dysfunctional. In 2005, when Apple and Google started looking into how to reduce the frictions in the mobile phone business, it wasn’t obvious what sort of platform they should build or how they should go about nurturing a healthy ecosystem around it. Maybe One Side Is Enough Steve Jobs, having created a highly successful music business around the iPod, was worried: “The device that can eat our lunch is the cell phone.”26 People wouldn’t need iPods if handset makers built music players into them.
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Since AT&T’s share of US mobile connections in the second quarter of 2007 was only 26.2 percent, the iPhone wasn’t available to 73.8 percent of subscribers unless they switched carriers.32 The iPhone was thus a single-sided business when Apple made the first iPhone available on June 29, 2007. Apple made the handset, the operating system, and most of the apps. It just needed to get the subscribers of the mobile carriers, the ones it did exclusive deals with, to buy its new phone. Herding Cats Larry Page was as worried about the mobile phone as Steve Jobs, but for a different reason.33 Google made its money serving ads on the web that people accessed from desktop computers. With the explosion in mobile devices, Page thought it was clear that most people were eventually going to move from fixed to mobile devices.
pages: 260 words: 76,223 Ctrl Alt Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends on It. by Mitch Joel
3D printing, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, call centre, clockwatching, cloud computing, content marketing, digital nomad, do what you love, Firefox, future of work, gamification, ghettoisation, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, place-making, prediction markets, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TechCrunch disrupt, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game
Even in open environments, remember that headphones are the new DO NOT DISTURB sign. Lesson #3—Create more collisions. Apple’s new campus (which is due to be completed in 2016) will cover close to three million square feet and hold up to thirteen thousand Apple employees. The headquarters (based in Cupertino, California) will also house its own power plant and over six thousand trees. The design has been called a “spaceship,” and reading the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson tells us there’s a powerful reason for its circular shape: Steve Jobs loved moments of collision. The biography tells the tale of Pixar’s headquarters where the bathrooms were something of a hike for the majority of employees.
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And what this data indicates is that the one-screen world is not a possible trend but an inevitability that has already taken place, and that the growth continues at an exponential pace. When Apple CEO Tim Cook took to the stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on March 7, 2012, many people were waiting to see both how Cook would handle the first major release from Apple in a post–Steve Jobs world and what the rumored iPad would be capable of, as the iPad 2 was still selling well. Beyond a smooth performance and a new iPad that featured Retina Display with a faster computer processor (dual-core A5X processor with quad-core graphics, thank you very much), few picked up on the staggering data point that Cook enlightened us all with. Apple sold over fifteen million iPads in the first quarter of 2012.
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In it, author Henry Bloget reported that two-thirds of Apple’s revenue came from products that were invented from 2007 onward. One of the most memorable lines out of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs was this quote: “If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will.” The question becomes this: Is there a critical path or road map for the rest of us? Is it really possible for the rest of us to be as innovative and risk-taking as Apple? If it were possible, then Apple would not seem to be so different, brave, and bold. That being said, there are some common threads that weave through the most entrepreneurial individuals and organizations. For some this involves their ability to embrace new business models; for others it’s the ability to respect the business owners that they have become, while still embracing their internal entrepreneurs (and letting that mindset roam free).
pages: 185 words: 43,609 Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters
Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Andy Kessler, Berlin Wall, cleantech, cloud computing, crony capitalism, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, don't be evil, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, heat death of the universe, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, life extension, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, Tesla Model S, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, working poor
Branding A company has a monopoly on its own brand by definition, so creating a strong brand is a powerful way to claim a monopoly. Today’s strongest tech brand is Apple: the attractive looks and carefully chosen materials of products like the iPhone and MacBook, the Apple Stores’ sleek minimalist design and close control over the consumer experience, the omnipresent advertising campaigns, the price positioning as a maker of premium goods, and the lingering nimbus of Steve Jobs’s personal charisma all contribute to a perception that Apple offers products so good as to constitute a category of their own. Many have tried to learn from Apple’s success: paid advertising, branded stores, luxurious materials, playful keynote speeches, high prices, and even minimalist design are all susceptible to imitation.
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But by then Gates’s enemies had already deprived his company of the full engagement of its founder, and Microsoft entered an era of relative stagnation. Today Gates is better known as a philanthropist than a technologist. THE RETURN OF THE KING Just as the legal attack on Microsoft was ending Bill Gates’s dominance, Steve Jobs’s return to Apple demonstrated the irreplaceable value of a company’s founder. In some ways, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were opposites. Jobs was an artist, preferred closed systems, and spent his time thinking about great products above all else; Gates was a businessman, kept his products open, and wanted to run the world. But both were insider/outsiders, and both pushed the companies they started to achievements that nobody else would have been able to match.
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Grossman and David Gahr/Getty Images 14.5: Jim Morrison, Elektra Records and CBS via Getty Images 14.5: Kurt Cobain, Frank Micelotta/Stringer/Getty Images 14.5: Amy Winehouse, flickr user teakwood, used under CC BY-SA 14.6: Howard Hughes, Bettmann/CORBIS 14.6: magazine cover, TIME, a division of Time Inc. 14.7: Bill Gates, Doug Wilson/CORBIS 14.7: magazine cover, Newsweek 14.8: Steve Jobs, 1984, Norman Seeff 14.8: Steve Jobs, 2004, Contour by Getty Images Index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abound Solar Accenture advertising, 3.1, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3 Afghanistan Airbnb airline industry Allen, Paul Amazon, 2.1, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 12.1 Amundsen, Roald Andreessen, Horowitz Andreessen, Marc Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) antitrust Apollo Program Apple, 4.1, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 14.1 branding of monopoly profits of Aristotle Army Corps of Engineers AT&T Aztecs Baby Boomers Bacon, Francis Bangladesh Barnes & Noble Beijing Bell Labs Berlin Wall Better Place Bezos, Jeff, 5.1, 6.1 big data Bill of Rights, U.S.
pages: 197 words: 60,477 So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport
Apple II, bounce rate, business cycle, Byte Shop, Cal Newport, capital controls, cleantech, Community Supported Agriculture, deliberate practice, do what you love, financial independence, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, information asymmetry, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge worker, Mason jar, medical residency, new economy, passive income, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, renewable energy credits, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Bolles, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, web application, winner-take-all economy
Rule #1 is dedicated to laying out my argument against passion, as this insight—that “follow your passion” is bad advice—provides the foundation for everything that follows. Perhaps the best place to start is where we began, with the real story of Steve Jobs and the founding of Apple Computer. Do What Steve Jobs Did, Not What He Said If you had met a young Steve Jobs in the years leading up to his founding of Apple Computer, you wouldn’t have pegged him as someone who was passionate about starting a technology company. Jobs had attended Reed College, a prestigious liberal arts enclave in Oregon, where he grew his hair long and took to walking barefoot.
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Jobs jumped at the opportunity to make an even larger amount of money and began scrounging together start-up capital. It was in this unexpected windfall that Apple Computer was born. As Young emphasizes, “Their plans were circumspect and small-time. They weren’t dreaming of taking over the world.” The Messy Lessons of Jobs I shared the details of Steve Jobs’s story, because when it comes to finding fulfilling work, the details matter. If a young Steve Jobs had taken his own advice and decided to only pursue work he loved, we would probably find him today as one of the Los Altos Zen Center’s most popular teachers. But he didn’t follow this simple advice. Apple Computer was decidedly not born out of passion, but instead was the result of a lucky break—a “small-time” scheme that unexpectedly took off.
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In Rule #1, I provided several examples of people who had great jobs and love (or loved) what they do—so we can draw from there. Among others, I introduced Apple founder Steve Jobs, radio host Ira Glass, and master surfboard shaper Al Merrick. Using this trio as our running example, I can now ask what it is specifically about these three careers that makes them so compelling? Here are the answers that I came up with: TRAITS THAT DEFINE GREAT WORK Creativity: Ira Glass, for example, is pushing the boundaries of radio, and winning armfuls of awards in the process. Impact: From the Apple II to the iPhone, Steve Jobs has changed the way we live our lives in the digital age. Control: No one tells Al Merrick when to wake up or what to wear.
The Naked Presenter: Delivering Powerful Presentations With or Without Slides by Garr Reynolds
deliberate practice, fear of failure, Hans Rosling, index card, Mahatma Gandhi, Maui Hawaii, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs
Conversations, after all, are not one way. Admitting that it is a bit of a generalization, Sierra says, “If you’re using formal language in a lecture, learning book (or marketing message, for that Chapter 5 Sustain with Pace and Participation 147 Wow! eBook <WoweBook.Com> Presentation Tips from a Steve Jobs Keynote Apple’s Steve Jobs is a good example of someone who presents with the help of multimedia in an engaging style. It’s true that he has great products to talk about, but he is also incredibly skilled at presenting those products. Great content is a necessary condition, but it is not sufficient. Jobs has both solid content and excellent delivery skills.
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If we are not vehemently devoted to avoiding cognitive overload, we may end up preventing learning. Chapter 2 First Things First: Preparation 37 Wow! eBook <WoweBook.Com> Know your audience When I was working at Apple in Cupertino, California, I received an email forwarded from Steve Jobs’s office. The email was from the leader of a user group whose organization had received a presentation from one of Apple’s field engineers the day before. The user group leader was not happy with the presentation and decided to let the CEO of the firm know of his displeasure. My job was to investigate the problem and smooth things over with the user group.
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Nonetheless, I set up the equipment as planned. I mingled around and talked to many members before the presentation. They were gracious hosts, a common characteristic of Apple user groups. During this time I realized that my prepared talk—as good as I thought it was—was not going to be a good fit for this particular group. I was disappointed, but was determined to push ahead with my presentation. After all, I was from Apple and people expect a kind of “mini-me” version of a Steve Jobs presentation, don’t they? Still, somehow the projector-and-computer accompaniment did not feel right for the context. Chapter 5 Sustain with Pace and Participation 141 Wow!
pages: 252 words: 74,167 Thinking Machines: The Inside Story of Artificial Intelligence and Our Race to Build the Future by Luke Dormehl
Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, book scanning, borderless world, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, drone strike, Elon Musk, Flash crash, friendly AI, game design, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, hive mind, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet of things, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, PageRank, pattern recognition, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!
It’s still a data problem, just an inverse one. What makes someone creative is the ability to recognise that they are on the right lines with a certain idea. Shortly after he returned to Apple in 1997, Steve Jobs described innovation as the ability to say no to 1,000 possible ideas. ‘You have to pick carefully,’ he said. ‘I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done.’ Steve Jobs eventually led Apple to create iTunes, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, but before he did this he said no to dozens of other products the company had been working on in his absence. Fortunately, machines are getting better at this task, too.
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It could, for instance, pull concert data from StubHub, movie reviews from Rotten Tomatoes, restaurant data from Yelp, and order taxis through TaxiMagic. In April 2010, Apple acquired the company for an amount reported to be around $200 million. Under the guidance of Steve Jobs (one of the last projects he was heavily involved with before stepping down as Apple’s CEO as his health worsened), several modifications were made to Siri. Much as Apple had done thirty years earlier with its graphical user interface, Jobs played up the friendliness and accessibility of the AI assistant. He insisted on giving it spoken responses – which the original Siri app had not had – and got rid of the ability to type requests as well as just ask them, so as not to complicate the experience of using it.
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In all their ‘bigger, taller, heavier’ grandeur, they speak to the final days of an age that was, unbeknownst to attendees of the fair, coming to a close. The Age of Industry was on its way out, to be superseded by the personal computer-driven Age of Information. For those children born in 1964 and after, digits would replace rivets in their engineering dreams. Apple’s Steve Jobs was only nine years old at the time of the New York World’s Fair. Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, would not be born for close to another decade; Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg for another ten years after that. As it turned out, the most forward-looking section of Flushing Meadows Corona Park turned out to be the exhibit belonging to International Business Machines Corporation, better known as IBM.
pages: 165 words: 47,193 The End of Work: Why Your Passion Can Become Your Job by John Tamny
Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, cloud computing, commoditize, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Downton Abbey, future of work, George Gilder, haute cuisine, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra
But when its CEO, Ken Olson, was asked about the personal desktop computer that rival IBM was readying for the market, he responded that “there is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.”40 At the time, Harvard dropout Bill Gates’s obscure startup, Microsoft, had thirty-eight employees.41 Gates plainly didn’t agree with Olson about the future of the personal computer, and neither did his eventual rival Steve Jobs, the Reed College dropout who founded Apple Computer in 1977.42 Four years later, Apple went public in the most oversubscribed initial public offering since 1956,43 turning three hundred Apple employees into millionaires. Not long after Apple went public, a pre-med student at the University of Texas named Michael Dell started PCs Limited out of his dorm room. Lacking funds to take on a lot of inventory, Dell hit on the idea of selling computers over the phone so he wouldn’t have to commit capital to equipment until he had actual orders.44 It’s a safe bet that most of those new Apple millionaires, like the tycoons at Apple’s competitors, had gone to college.
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Chapter Nine: Why We Need People with Money to Burn 1.Warren Brookes, The Economy in Mind (New York: Universe Books, 1982), p. 77. 2.Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 407. 3.Ibid., 157. 4.David McCullough, The Wright Brothers (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 34. 5.Ibid., 108. 6.Konstantin Kakaes, “New Directions,” Wall Street Journal, June 25–26, 2016. 7.Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 339. 8.Dawn Kawamoto, Ben Heskett, and Mike Ricciuti, “Microsoft to invest $150 million in Apple,” CNET, August 6, 1997. 9.Alexis Tsotsis, “Uber Gets $32 Million From Menlo Ventures, Jeff Bezos, and Goldman Sachs,” Tech Crunch, December 7, 2011. 10.Source: Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/profile/jeff-bezos/. 11.Peter Thiel with Blake Masters, Zero to One (New York: Crown Business, 2014), 84. 12.Noam Cohen, “Technology’s Trumpian Visions,” New York Times, July 27, 2016. 13.Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2012), 37. 14.Ibid., 13. 15.Ibid., 168. 16.Ibid., 52. 17.Ibid., 60. 18.Ibid., 62. 19.Michael Freeman, ESPN: The Uncensored History (Lanham, Md.: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2000), 58. 20.Ibid., 59. 21.Ibid. 22.Ibid., 7. 23.Ibid., 77. 24.Thomas Kessner, Capital City: New York City and the Men Behind Its Rise to Economic Dominance, 1860–1900 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003). 25.T.
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The Washington Post once confidently asserted, “It is a fact that man can’t fly.”4 Thank goodness the Wright Brothers not only ignored the naysayers but also had enough revenue from their bicycle shop to invest the considerable sum of one thousand dollars in their seemingly impossible aviation project.5 When the venture capitalist Ed Tuck set his mind to making GPS technology available to the general public, his search for investors led to eighty-six rejections before he found someone to help him bring Magellan GPS systems to market.6 But consider the unseen. How many advances have never seen the light of day because the wealth to back them wasn’t available? It’s hard to believe, now that Apple is the most valuable company on Earth, but when Steve Jobs returned from exile in 1997 to run the company he had co-founded, it was “less than ninety days from being insolvent.”7 Bill Gates, one of the world’s richest men, invested $150 million in Jobs’s return to Apple.8 How many more investments might Gates have made, how many more world-changing companies might he have saved, how many more global problems might his foundation have solved with the billions that he and Microsoft have handed over in taxes over the years?
The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley by Leslie Berlin
Apple II, Bob Noyce, business cycle, California energy crisis, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, computer age, data science, Fairchild Semiconductor, George Gilder, Henry Singleton, informal economy, John Markoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, open economy, Richard Feynman, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War
., 1989. Apple founding: Mike Markkula, interview by author; Steve Jobs, interview by author; Michael Moritz, The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computer (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1984). Nothing else was in Intel’s interest: Mike Markkula, interview by author. Even a supplier-customer relationship between Intel and Apple failed to materialize. Wozniak had originally chosen a Motorola processor for Apple machines, and even though Markkula says he and Grove met several times to discuss whether a switch to an Intel chip was warranted, “the timing was never right,” and so Apple stayed with Motorola.
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Jobs at McKenna dinner: Ann Bowers, interview by author. Not very appealing: Arthur Rock quoted in “HBS [Harvard Business School] Working Knowledge,” http://hbswk.hbs.edu/pubitem.jhtml?id=1821&t= special_reports_donedeals Noyce and Jobs Seabee accident: Steve Jobs, interview by author. Remember personal things: Steve Jobs, interview by author. Apple Computer IPO: Apple Computer prospectus, 12 Dec. 1980. On Tandem: Smith, “Silicon Valley Spirit”; “The fall of an American Icon,” Business Week, 5 Feb. 1996. Compaq acquisition of Tandem: David Lazarus, “Compaq Boosts High End with Tandem Deal,” Inc., 23 June 1997.
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But he was equally 252 THE MAN BEHIND THE MICROCHIP convinced that Jobs and Wozniak were not the men to lead that market. This was especially true after Bowers brought home her first Apple in 1978, and she and Noyce spent much of the weekend on the phone to Mike Markkula trying to set it up properly. The Apple machine did not strike Noyce as the groundbreaking technical breakthrough necessary to bring computing power to the common man. But over time, Noyce’s feelings about Apple began to change. This was due, in no small measure, to Steve Jobs, who deliberately sought out Noyce as a mentor. ( Jobs also asked Jerry Sanders and Andy Grove if he could take them to lunch every quarter and “pick your brain.”)
pages: 217 words: 63,287 The Participation Revolution: How to Ride the Waves of Change in a Terrifyingly Turbulent World by Neil Gibb
Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, gig economy, iterative process, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kodak vs Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, performance metric, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, urban renewal, WeWork
So, in what many analysts at the time thought was an act of desperation, Apple’s board made a decision to buy NeXT, the company that Steve Jobs had set up after he was ousted from Apple back in 1985. Acquiring NeXT gave Apple a much-needed new operating system to work with – and a really good one at that. But far more crucially…it also gave it Steve Jobs. While Apple’s engineers were tasked with the job of modifying NeXT’s OS to work with its drab grey boxes, Jobs was given the job of turning the company around. And this is when he did something that would set Apple on course to become the most innovative, influential, and valuable company of the 21st century – and in so doing, pave the way for a generation of new companies that would soon start to transform the way the world worked.
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Bright, savvy customers like Jay know how to get a good deal. If she were thinking and acting like a normal customer, Apple would be toast. But she isn’t. Jay’s behaviour mirrors that of the Manchester United supporters on the terraces at Old Trafford. Jay isn’t an Apple customer, she is an Apple fan – which means she has a totally different relationship with the brand. This is what Apple – and particularly Steve Jobs, when he was at the helm – has known for years, and what Nokia totally missed when they opened their concept store. Apple doesn’t have customers, it has fans. And you don’t get fans simply by opening a flashy store.
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It also has the same root as the word “spiritual”. Steve Jobs engaged at a very deep and personal level. He called Apple “the largest start-up in the world” for a good reason. Under his leadership, its primary purpose was the fulfilment of its social mission. It was all about the why, not the what. In 1997, Apple was a failing computer company with a rapidly diminishing value of $3 billion. Nokia dominated the high-end mobile phone market. Kodak dominated the photography market. Palm and Handspring vied with each other in the hand-held market. Twenty years later, Apple’s iPhone dominated all three categories.
pages: 293 words: 78,439 Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future by Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson
activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, blockchain, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Internet of things, invention of hypertext, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, long term incentive plan, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, obamacare, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, pez dispenser, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, the market place, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transfer pricing, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar
Be Willing to Wave Good-Bye to the Past We haven’t spent much time in this book detailing perhaps the most iconic transformations of the 1990s (IBM) and early 2000s (Apple). Both examples are well documented and indeed are powerful examples of dual transformation. And in both cases transformation A involved jettisoning key parts of the historic core business. In IBM’s case, over the past two decades, beyond substantial investments to create a services arm, the company exited the hard disk drive, printer, and personal computer markets. Apple cofounder Steve Jobs was known as a creation maestro, but his first set of actions when he returned to Apple in the late 1990s wasn’t to create; it was to destroy. He consolidated Apple’s complicated product portfolio to four products.
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Commercials, hilarious in retrospect, touted the fact that Rokr was the first handset that integrated Apple’s iTunes music software. Popular artists like Madonna and the Red Hot Chili Peppers poured into a phone booth and the voice-over intoned, “One hundred tunes in your pocket, baby.” One hundred tunes. Wow. It was clear from the beginning that then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs was ambivalent about the partnership. Just two weeks after the commercial launch, Jobs noted publicly, “We see it as something we can learn from. It was a way to put our toe in the water.” Apple had also filed a number of patents that would enable it to create a simple, elegant phone, such as its 2004 filing (granted in 2010) for a “capacitive touchscreen.”
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The great fun is doing what you do every day. I’m sort of a poster child for not sort of doing anything but what we do every day . . . We’re a very poorly diversified portfolio. It either goes to the moon or crashes to the Earth.” And crash both Nokia and RIM did. In January 2007 Steve Jobs announced, and in June Apple launched, the iPhone. Dubbed the “Jesus phone” by worshippers, the phone created a media firestorm and immediately started showing up in the hands of celebrities. In November, Google, along with a range of handset manufacturers, formed the Open Handset Alliance, powered by Google’s Android operating system.
pages: 386 words: 91,913 The Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age by David S. Abraham
3D printing, Airbus A320, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cleantech, commoditize, Deng Xiaoping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global supply chain, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, reshoring, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, Y2K
Fred Vogelstein, “And Then Steve Said, ‘Let There Be an iPhone,’ ” New York Times, October 6, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/and-then-steve-said-let-there-be-an-iphone.html?pagewanted=all; Steve Jobs, “Steve Jobs: Complete Transcript of Steve Jobs, Macworld Conference and Expo, January 9, 2007,” Genius, January 9, 2007, http://genius.com/Steve-jobs-complete-transcript-of-steve-jobs-macworld-conference-and-expo-january-9-2007-annotated/. 4. Helen Walters, “A Sputnik Moment for STEM Education: Ainissa Ramirez at TED2012,” TED Blog, March 2, 2012, accessed November 2, 2014, http://blog.ted.com/2012/03/02/a-sputnik-moment-for-stem-education-ainissa-ramirez-at-ted2012/. 5.
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“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance,” Ballmer prophesied during a CEO Forum before Steve Jobs released the iPhone in June 2007. But, by the end of the first week of sales, most storeroom shelves were bare; Apple and its AT&T partner sold hundreds of thousands of phones. The company was fast on its way to taking more than 20 percent of the smartphone market within just a few months.1 To those who waited in line outside Apple stores for a day or two to snap up the first phones—or paid others hundreds of dollars to wait for them—the iPhone was a revolution, the stuff of dreams.
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Geological Survey Scientific Investigations Report 2012–5215” (Reston, VA, 2012), available at http://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2012/5215/. 10. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011). 11. C. Hagelüken, R. Drielsmann, and K. Ven den Broeck, “Availability of Metals and Materials,” in Precious Materials Handbook, Ulla Sehrt and Matthias Grehl, 10–35 (Hanau-Wolfgang, Germany: Umicore AG, 2012). 12. Michael Wolff, “Michael Wolff: Uber Invades the World,” USA-Today, June 14, 2014, http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/columnist/wolff/2014/06/14/the-rise-of-uber/10417655/; Brian Lam, “The Life of Steve Jobs,” Gizmodo, August 24, 2011, http://gizmodo.com/5301470/the-life-of-steve-jobs---so-far. 13. Michael Feroli, “Economics Web Note,” Morgan Markets, J.P.
pages: 222 words: 54,506 One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com by Richard L. Brandt
Amazon Web Services, automated trading system, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, Dynabook, Elon Musk, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, new economy, Pershing Square Capital Management, science of happiness, search inside the book, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, software patent, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K
Frox was developing “revolutionary” home entertainment systems, including the much-publicized Frox wand, a one-button universal remote. Frox had attracted engineers from Lucasfilm, Droidworks, Xerox PARC, Sun Microsystems, and Apple Computer. But Frox didn’t have the design flair of Steve Jobs. Kaphan lasted about three years, the company lasted twenty. In 1992 Kaphan joined Kaleida Labs, a joint venture between Apple and IBM, which created a digital multimedia player for computers, and wanted to create a similar program for television set-top boxes. Founded in 1991, it was folded into Apple in 1995. In the spring of 1994, just about the time Bezos was looking for an idea that he could turn into a good Web-based business, Herb and Shel were doing the same thing.
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Except for Web services, Bezos sold only physical goods in Amazon’s first decade. Then, on March 4, 2003, Apple’s Steve Jobs demonstrated that some physical products were unnecessary. The music CD was simply a way of delivering the real product, the music itself. But music can be digitized and shipped over the Internet without the cost of the physical CD or the expense of mailing. The iTunes music store was born. Sometime in 2004 Bezos had an Amazon executive approach Gregg Zehr, a hardware developer who had worked at Apple and at palmOne, which created the Palm personal digital assistant. The executive asked Zehr to start a new company in order to create a new electronic book reader for Amazon.
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This was, no doubt, due partly to the fact that Steve Jobs had already agreed to the agency model, which could have given Apple better access to e-books from placated publishers. On the other hand, in October 2010 Amazon offered to pay royalties of 70 percent to authors who self-publish through the Kindle store, compared to 25 percent from most publishers. For now, the Kindle still leads the market for e-book readers at its current price. Research company ChangeWave estimated that the Kindle had the largest share of the market in early 2011, at 47 percent. Apple’s iPad (which does much more than just read books and is more expensive) had a 32 percent share.
A People’s History of Computing in the United States by Joy Lisi Rankin
activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Charles Babbage, computer age, corporate social responsibility, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, pink-collar, profit motive, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog, wikimedia commons
MECC people reflected on their “awareness and appreciation” of computing, just as they praised the social aspects of their network, the rich “people- to- people contact.”34 Networked computing via time-sharing thrived in Minnesota, having been motivated by a desire to equally serve citizens across the state, to provide the “same opportunities in computing . . . to a rural resident as to anyone in the suburbs or Twin Cities.”35 Just as DEC had spurred sales of its time-sharing minicomputer systems by making them attractive to students and educators, Apple also targeted schools in the late 1970s. Steve Jobs later explained that “schools buying Apple IIs” was “one of the t hings that built Apple IIs.”36 Indeed, a MECC staff member who had attended a conference in California reported to his colleagues in Minnesota about the amazing Apple II computer he had seen, and MECC soon arranged to buy over five hundred of them from Jobs and Wozniak.37 MECC led the nation in placing microcomputers in its classrooms, and Apple gained an early and large share of the educational computing market; moreover, the long- ago decision to implement Dartmouth Time-Sharing with BASIC at UHigh in Minneapolis had important ramifications all these years later.38 MECC and its constituent members (such as TIES and MERITSS [Minnesota Educational 240 A People’s History of Computing in the United States Regional Interactive Time-Sharing System]) had been building a library of applications and games—w ritten in BASIC —since the 1960s.
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Increasingly, people would have to purchase computers and software (now, devices and apps) for their personal and social computing. BASIC also figures prominently in the history of Apple. Steve Wozniak produced his own “Integer BASIC” for his homemade computer, built around MOS Technology’s 6502 microprocessor chip; he shared Integer BASIC , and he even published programs in Dr. Dobb’s Journal.29 When Wozniak’s high school chum Steve Jobs saw the computer, he proposed they team up to assemble and sell them. They named the computer Apple, and soon began working on a new version, the Apple II. Although Apple declared its philosophy 238 A People’s History of Computing in the United States was “to provide software for our machines f ree or at minimal cost,” Apple sought (aggressively) to sell its hardware.30 W hether they w ere called home computers, hobby computers, microcomputers, or personal computers, they were consumer products, purveyed by Steve Jobs.
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Gates first learned to program in BASIC , the language on which he built his Microsoft empire. Wozniak adapted Tiny BASIC into Integer BASIC to program his homemade computer, the computer that attracted the partnership of Steve Jobs and launched Apple. And the Minnesota software library, mostly BASIC programs including The Oregon Trail, proved to be the ideal complement for the hardware of Apple Computers. During the 1980s, the combination of Apple hardware and MECC software 10 A People’s History of Computing in the United States cemented the transformation from computing citizens to computing consumers. The title of this work nods to Howard Zinn’s groundbreaking A People’s History of the United States.
pages: 328 words: 84,682 The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power by Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer, David B. Yoffie
activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, gig economy, Google Chrome, independent contractor, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Metcalfe’s law, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Network effects, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vision Fund, web application, zero-sum game
Gates would soon enter the software applications business himself to grow the IBM-compatible PC market and take more of the profit, with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. He did this first for Apple’s Macintosh computer, introduced in 1984, and then for DOS and Windows PCs, bundled in the Office suite from 1990. To encourage other companies to help expand demand for PCs, Gates also decided to give away for free the software development kit (SDK) needed to build applications for DOS and then Windows. By contrast, Apple cofounder and CEO Steve Jobs did not give away software development kits for free or try to build a broad applications market. Instead, he hired Microsoft in 1982 and paid Gates a $50,000 advance to write applications for the Macintosh personal computer, which was incompatible with DOS.5 Jobs also charged hundreds of dollars to developers who wanted to build Macintosh applications on their own.
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Selby, Microsoft Secrets (New York: Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 1995), 137, 158–59. 3.This information comes from a 1994 magazine interview with Bill Gates cited in Cusumano and Selby, Microsoft Secrets, 159. 4.David B. Yoffie and Michael A. Cusumano, Strategy Rules: Five Timeless Lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs (New York: HarperBusiness, 2015), 98–100. 5.Manes and Andrews, Gates, 245–46. 6.For details, see “Did Apple not originally allow anyone to develop software for the Macintosh?” Stack Exchange Retrocomputing, https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/2513/did-apple-not-originally-allow-anyone-to-develop-software-for-the-macintosh/2520?utm_medium=organic&utm_source=google_rich_qa&utm_campaign=google_rich_qa (accessed May 21, 2018). 7.Yoffie and Cusumano, Strategy Rules, 114. 8.Mathew Rosenberg and Sheera Frenkel, “Facebook’s Role in Data Misuse Sets Off a Storm on Two Continents,” New York Times, March 18, 2018; and Katrin Benhold, “Germany Acts to Tame Facebook, Learning from Its Own History of Hate,” New York Times, May 19, 2018. 9.Politico Staff, “Full Text: Mark Zuckerberg’s Wednesday Testimony to Congress on Cambridge Analytica,” Politico, April 11, 2018, https://www.politico.com/story/2018/04/09/transcript-mark-zuckerberg-testimony-to-congress-on-cambridge-analytica-509978 (accessed May 15, 2018). 10.See “List of Unicorn Start-Up Companies,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unicorn_start-up_companies (accessed May 21, 2018). 11.Brian X.
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We also wrote up our initial thoughts on market dynamics and how business models and strategy differed for innovation platforms as compared to transaction platforms. David Yoffie joined the project after the publication of Strategy Rules: Five Timeless Lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs (Yoffie and Cusumano, 2015), which included a detailed analysis of how platform thinking evolved at Microsoft, Intel, and Apple.4 We then expanded the scope of this new book to examine common mistakes among platform companies, challenges for conventional firms trying to compete with digital platforms, platform governance and antitrust issues, and some emerging platform technologies that could greatly impact the future.
pages: 278 words: 70,416 Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow
3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, attribution theory, augmented reality, barriers to entry, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filter Bubble, Google X / Alphabet X, hive mind, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, popular electronics, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, superconnector
That’s why so many busy and powerful people practice mind-clearing meditation and stick to rigid daily routines: to minimize distractions and maximize good decision making. Simplification is why Steve Jobs’s Magic Mouse doubled Apple’s mouse market share overnight. With zero buttons (the whole thing is a button, actually) and a touchscreen glass top, the mouse is both pretty and intuitive—a huge departure from the conventional “innovative” mouse arms race, which amounted to adding more bulk and more buttons. Similarly, Apple’s iPod won the MP3 player war with breakthrough simplicity, both in physical design and how the company explained it. While other companies touted “4 Gigabytes and a 0.5 Gigahertz processor!” Apple simply said, “1,000 songs in your pocket.”
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Analysis shows that entrepreneurs who have mentors end up raising seven times as much capital for their businesses, and experience 3.5 times faster growth than those without mentors. And in fact, of the companies surveyed, few managed to scale a profitable business model without a mentor’s aid. Even Steve Jobs, the famously visionary and dictatorial founder of Apple, relied on mentors, such as former football coach and Intuit CEO Bill Campbell, to keep himself sharp. SO, DATA INDICATES THAT those who train with successful people who’ve “been there” tend to achieve success faster. The winning formula, it seems, is to seek out the world’s best and convince them to coach us.
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He got to be the best by focusing on what he needed to know, knowing how to figure out what he didn’t know, and forgetting about everything else. Like Holmes, hackers strip the unnecessary from their lives. They zero in on what matters. Like great writers, innovators have the fortitude to cut the adverbs. This is why Apple founder Steve Jobs’s closet was filled with dozens of identical black turtlenecks and Levi’s 501 jeans—to simplify his choices. US presidents do the same thing. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” President Barack Obama told Michael Lewis for his October 2012 Vanity Fair cover story. “I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing.
pages: 418 words: 128,965 The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu
accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apple II, barriers to entry, British Empire, Burning Man, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, open economy, packet switching, PageRank, profit motive, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, sexual politics, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game
You could open up the Apple II, and there were slots and so on, and anyone could write for it. The Mac was way more closed. What happened?” “Oh,” said Wozniak. “That was Steve. He wanted it that way. The Apple II was my machine, and the Mac was his.” Apple’s origins were pure Steve Wozniak, but as everyone knows, it was the other founder, Steve Jobs, whose ideas made Apple what it is today. Jobs maintained the early image that he and Wozniak created, but beginning with the Macintosh in the 1980s, and accelerating through the age of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, he led Apple computers on a fundamentally different track.
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The spirit of Theodore Vail was alive and well in the resurrected dominion of the firm with which Apple was now allied. Within two years of the iPhone launch, relations between Apple and Google would sour as the two pursued equally grand, though inimical, visions of the future. In 2009 hearings before the FCC, they now sat on opposite sides. Steve Jobs accused Google of wasting its time in the mobile phone market; a new Google employee named Tim Bray in 2010 described Apple’s iPhone as “a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers.… I hate it.”3 As this makes clear, where once there had been only subtle differences there now lay a chasm. Apple, while it had always wavered on “openness,” had committed to a program that fairly suited not just the AT&T mind-set, but also the ideals of Hollywood and the entertainment conglomerates as well.
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Even if Windows was never as advanced or well designed as Apple’s operating system, it enjoyed one insuperable advantage: it worked on any computer, supported just about every type of software, and could interface with any printer, modem, or whatever other hardware one could design. After it was launched in the late eighties, early-nineties Windows ran off with the market Apple had pioneered, based mostly on ideas that had been Apple’s to begin with. The victory of PCs and Windows over Apple was viewed by many as the defining parable of the decade; its moral was “open beats closed.” It suggested that Wozniak had been right from the beginning. But by then Steve Jobs had been gone for years, having been forced out of Apple in 1985 in a boardroom coup. Yet even in his absence Jobs would never agree about the superiority of openness, maintaining all the while that closed had simply not yet been perfected.
pages: 222 words: 70,132 Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin
"there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart grid, Snapchat, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product
Brown explains: “Xerox built big complicated stuff that sold for $250,000 a unit and came with three-year guarantees. What was the chance that any of the PARC stuff could ever be sold through the Xerox channels? Zero.” So the decision was made to try to partner with Apple. Almost every version of the story of Steve Jobs visiting PARC for a demonstration in December of 1979 is wrong. It is usually said to epitomize the complete failure on Xerox’s part to understand what they had invented. A bit of background: Apple had successfully launched the Apple II computer in April of 1977. It was an instant hit, and between September of 1977 and September of 1980, yearly sales grew from $775,000 to $118 million, an average annual growth rate of 533 percent.
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The tragedy for Xerox was that two years later, the Xerox CFO sold all its Apple stock. Imagine what it would have meant to the company if it had held on to 5 percent of Apple, which would now be worth about $32 billion. In 1985, after the debut of the Macintosh, Microsoft quickly introduced Windows, an operating system that totally mimicked the Macintosh. Whatever advantage Apple had was quickly extinguished, and Steve Jobs was forced out of the company. Jobs immediately set out for revenge on his old company by building a new computer called NeXT. Not long after that, a twenty-nine-year-old English engineer, Tim Berners-Lee, took up a position at the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN).
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The earliest networks—like the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (WELL), organized by Stewart Brand, the founder of The Whole Earth Catalog—grew directly out of 1960s counterculture. Brand had helped novelist Ken Kesey organize the Acid Tests—epic be-ins where thousands of hippies ingested LSD and danced to the music of a new band, the Grateful Dead. Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computer, Inc., dropped acid as well. “Jobs explained,” wrote John Markoff in his book What the Dormouse Said, “that he still believed that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life, and he said he felt that because people he knew well had not tried psychedelics, there were things about him they couldn’t understand.”
pages: 392 words: 108,745 Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think by James Vlahos
Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Loebner Prize, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, PageRank, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TechCrunch disrupt, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!
Titans 39 Decades before he founded Amazon: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on how he got a role in Star Trek Beyond, posted to YouTube on October 23, 2016, https://goo.gl/RJKBL1. 39 “build space hotels”: Luisa Yanez, “Jeff Bezos: A rocket launched from Miami’s Palmetto High,” Miami Herald, August 5, 2013, https://goo.gl/GxFrx8. 40 After the discussion with Hart: Greg Hart, interview with author, April 27, 2018. 41 “If we could build it”: this and subsequent quotes from Greg Hart come from interview with author, April 27, 2018. 41 “We think it [the project] is critical to Amazon’s success”: this and subsequent quotes from Al Lindsay, unless otherwise identified, come from interview with author, April 4, 2018. 42 Rohit Prasad, a scientist whom Amazon hired: Rohit Prasad, interview with author, April 2, 2018. 44 Bezos was reportedly aiming for the stars: Joshua Brustein, “The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo,” Bloomberg Businessweek, April 19, 2016, https://goo.gl/4SIi8F. 44 “hero feature”: Prasad, interview with author. 44 An article in Bloomberg Businessweek : Brustein, “The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo.” 45 “Amazon just surprised everyone”: Chris Welch, “Amazon just surprised everyone with a crazy speaker that talks to you,” The Verge, November 6, 2014, https://goo.gl/sVgsPi. 45 “Don’t laugh at or ignore”: Mike Elgan, “Why Amazon Echo is the future of every home,” Computerworld, November 8, 2014, https://goo.gl/wriJXE. 45 “the happiest person in the world”: this and other quotes from Adam Cheyer, unless otherwise indicated, come from interviews with author, April 19 and 23, 2018. 45 “Apple’s digital assistant was delivered”: Farhad Manjoo, “Siri Is a Gimmick and a Tease,” Slate, November 15, 2012, https://goo.gl/2cSoK. 46 Steve Wozniak, one of the original cofounders of Apple: Bryan Fitzgerald, “‘Woz’ gallops in to a horse’s rescue,” Albany Times Union, June 13, 2012, https://goo.gl/dPdHso. 46 Even Jack in the Box ran an ad: Yukari Iwatani Kane, Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), 154. 46 Years later, some people who had worked: Aaron Tilley and Kevin McLaughlin, “The Seven-Year Itch: How Apple’s Marriage to Siri Turned Sour,” The Information, March 14, 2018, https://goo.gl/6e7BxM. 48 “artificially-intelligent orphan”: Bosker, “Siri Rising.” 48 “Siri’s various teams morphed”: Tilley and McLaughlin, “The Seven-Year Itch.” 48 John Burkey, who was part: John Burkey, interview with author, June 19, 2018. 49 “it’s really the first time in history”: Megan Garber, “Sorry, Siri: How Google Is Planning to Be Your New Personal Assistant,” The Atlantic, April 29, 2013, https://goo.gl/XFLPDP. 49 “We are not shipping”: Dan Farber, “Microsoft’s Bing seeks enlightenment with Satori,” CNET, July 30, 2013, https://goo.gl/fnLVmb. 50 CNN Tech ran an emblematic headline: Adrian Covert, “Meet Cortana, Microsoft’s Siri,” CNN Tech, April 2, 2014, https://goo.gl/pyoW4v. 50 “feels like a potent mashup of Google Now’s worldliness”: Chris Velazco, “Living with Cortana, Windows 10’s thoughtful, flaky assistant,” Engadget, July 30, 2015, https://goo.gl/mbZpon. 50 “arrogant disdain followed by panic”: Burkey, interview with author. 51 “I’ll start teaching it”: Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Jarvis,” Facebook blog, December 19, 2016, https://goo.gl/DyQSBN. 51 Zuckerberg might have to say a command: Daniel Terdiman, “At Home With Mark Zuckerberg And Jarvis, The AI Assistant He Built For His Family,” Fast Company, December 19, 2016, https://goo.gl/qJNIxW. 51 One lucky user who tested M: Alex Kantrowitz, “Facebook Reveals The Secrets Behind ‘M,’ Its Artificial Intelligence Bot,” BuzzFeed, November 19, 2015, https://goo.gl/bwmFyN. 52 “an experiment to see what people would ask”: Kemal El Moujahid, interview with author, September 29, 2017. 54 “just the tip of the iceberg”: Mark Bergen, “Jeff Bezos says more than 1,000 people are working on Amazon Echo and Alexa,” Recode, May 31, 2016, https://goo.gl/hhSQXc. 59 “When you speak”: Robert Hoffer, interview with author, April 30, 2018. 4.
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He swiped at the little slider on the screen to answer the call, but for some reason it took seven tries before it worked. This little fail was ironic given who was phoning. “Hi,” the caller said. “Is this Dag?” “Yeah,” Kittlaus replied. “This is Steve Jobs.” “Really?” said Kittlaus, who had received no forewarning that the Apple CEO was going to call. He turned toward a colleague standing nearby and mouthed, It’s Steve Jobs! No way! his colleague mouthed back. Jobs came straight to the point, according to Kittlaus’s account. “We love what you are doing,” Jobs said. “Can you come over to my house tomorrow?” Kittlaus got directions and asked if he could bring along his cofounders.
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Game Changers 4 To be sure, they have an unsurpassed ability: “The size of the World Wide Web (The Internet),” accessed on July 25, 2018, https://goo.gl/ihb0. 5 “The next big step”: Sundar Pichai, “This year’s Founders’ Letter,” Google blog, April 28, 2016, https://goo.gl/hMKbBS. 5 On computers, we squeeze our fingers: “Typewriter History,” Mytypewriter.com, https://goo.gl/cNSxXM. 7 There are around 2 billion: “Number of mobile phone users worldwide from 2015 to 2020 (in billions),” Statista, accessed on July 25, 2018, https://goo.gl/tv793j. 7 The number of deployed smart speakers: Bret Kinsella, “Smart Speakers to Reach 100 Million Installed Base Worldwide in 2018, Google to Catch Amazon by 2022,” Voicebot.ai, July 10, 2018, https://goo.gl/VKLB3F. 11 “When you hear a voice”: Ryan Germick, interview with author, April 26, 2018. 12 “Conversation is probably the hardest AI problem”: Ashwin Ram, interview with author, May 26, 2017. 14 “speech is so essential to our concept of intelligence”: Philip Lieberman, Eve Spoke: Human Language and Human Evolution (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), accessed July 25, 2018, https://goo.gl/VUpsxh. 2. Assistants 17 This slice of campus life: Knowledge Navigator (1987) Apple Computer, Apple concept video posted to YouTube on December 16, 2009, https://goo.gl/MyHN8l. 17 “mini-Steve Jobs”: Jay Yarow, “Why Apple’s Mobile Leader Scott Forstall Is Out,” Business Insider, October 29, 2012, https://goo.gl/p8rCss. 17 “I am really excited to show you Siri”: Let’s Talk iPhone—iPhone 4S Keynote 2011, posted to YouTube on October 5, 2011, https://goo.gl/32qJ5o. 18 “Telling me I can’t do something really sets me up”: this and subsequent quotes from Adam Cheyer, unless otherwise noted, come from interviews with author, April 19 and 23, 2018. 19 Cheyer had started a school club: Jon C.
pages: 465 words: 109,653 Free Ride by Robert Levine
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Anne Wojcicki, book scanning, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Firefox, future of journalism, Googley, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Justin.tv, Kevin Kelly, linear programming, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, offshore financial centre, pets.com, publish or perish, race to the bottom, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks
HOW TECHNOLOGY COULD TURN THE PAGE ON PUBLISHING On January 28, 2010, John Sargent Jr. and Brian Napack, the chief executive and the president of Macmillan Publishers, flew to Seattle to give Amazon.com some news they knew the online retailer wouldn’t like. A couple of days before, Macmillan had made a deal to sell its titles in Apple’s iBookstore, just as Steve Jobs was set to introduce the company’s new iPad. Rather than sell titles to Apple on a wholesale basis and let the company set a retail price, as it did with Amazon and other bookstores, Macmillan would set the price for its digital books itself and give Apple a 30 percent commission for selling them to consumers. Apple had also made similar deals with four of the other five major U.S. publishers. But Amazon wanted to set book prices as well.
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In the grand narrative of the music business collapse, the labels were rescued from their own incompetence by Steve Jobs’s iTunes music store, which made piracy a marginal problem. Apple certainly pushed the labels into doing something they were unable to do themselves, and its iTunes Store has become the biggest music retailer in the United States. But legitimate online music stores like Apple’s have hardly stopped piracy: more music is downloaded illegally than legally, according to the NPD Group.82 (Not all of those songs represent lost sales, of course, but surely some must.) And, like the industry’s attempts to turn file sharing into a legitimate business, the real story of Apple’s effect on the music business is more complicated than most people realize.
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To understand how technology executives see issues involving open platforms, remember that their perspective is informed by Apple’s 1980s struggle with Microsoft for the personal computer business. Then, as now, Steve Jobs wanted to control his products, so he declined to license the Macintosh operating system software to other computer makers. Since Microsoft didn’t make machines, it made deals to supply its operating system software to every PC clone company it could. As more companies began making computers that used Intel chips and Microsoft’s Windows operating system, competition drove down prices, “Wintel” machines dominated the industry, and Apple became an also-ran in the business it invented.
pages: 302 words: 95,965 How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs by Tim Draper
3D printing, Airbnb, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, business climate, carried interest, connected car, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, fiat currency, frictionless, frictionless market, high net worth, hiring and firing, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game
People don’t say, “Hotmail me” or “Bing it,” but they could have if the marketing departments at those companies had done some thinking about making their companies’ services into a verb. As you go through your daily routine, try to think about all the companies that touch you and whether they are verbs. Marketing is 20% hard facts and 80% human brain. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPod, there were 40 other music storage devices on the market and some with four times as much memory. But Apple dominated the market. Why? Because Steve Jobs understood the human side of commerce. He understood that by creating a story behind the product, by making it “cool” or “hip” to have an iPod and making it fun and easy to use, it didn’t matter if the product was not quite as powerful or as fast or as cheap as the competition, because he knew that he could capture the customer’s emotion, mind, spirit and ego.
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Don't do things because I do them or Steve Jobs or Mark Cuban tried it. You need to know your personal brand and stay true to it. Gary Vaynerchuk A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well. Jeff Bezos My Brand Logo. Your logo should mean something. The initial logo for Draper Associates, designed by my cousin, Phyllis Merikallio, was a blue globe in front of a black triangle. I liked this for a lot of reasons. The triangle represented “change” and the globe represented “the world,” so together these images said, “Change the world.” Apple’s logo was a rainbow-colored apple, which was both eye catching and meant that the products were for everyone.
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His employees started chanting the same mantras and they even took on his fashion sense, wearing the same t-shirts and jeans that he did. He encouraged a very casual tone among his employees so that they knew that he just wanted them to get the job done (not to wait on protocol) and they responded accordingly. Steve Jobs created the meme of calling his employees “evangelists” so Apple employees would take on his religious fervor for the company. Many even wore jeans and black turtlenecks to emulate the great man. Bill Gates prided himself on his high IQ, so everyone at Microsoft was focused on being smart. Some employees even wore glasses that looked like the ones Bill wore whether they had a vision problem or not.
pages: 307 words: 90,634 Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil by Hamish McKenzie
Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, business climate, car-free, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cleantech, Colonization of Mars, connected car, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, megacity, Menlo Park, Nikolai Kondratiev, oil shale / tar sands, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, South China Sea, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, Zipcar
On September 23, 1997, Steve Jobs walked onstage to applause at a meeting of Apple executives and managers. He had returned to the company two months earlier as interim CEO and was determined to make changes. Dressed in sandals, shorts, and a black mock turtleneck with which the world would later become familiar, he looked relaxed, even though he had been up until 3:00 A.M. working on an ad campaign that he hoped would revive Apple’s brand. The brand had suffered from neglect since he left the company in 1985. Jobs didn’t mention it in the meeting, but the brand wasn’t all that was suffering at Apple. By 1997, the company had just 4 percent of the personal computer market and that year stood to lose more than a billion dollars.
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We’d already carved up mountains, paved over swamplands, and invented garages to cater to our four-wheeled wonder wagons, so giving up on them now hardly seemed realistic. After a multitude of commenters disabused me of my car-free fantasy, I breathed a sigh of concession and moved on. It was about then that I discovered Tesla. I had joined Pando in April 2012, a few months after Steve Jobs, the cofounder and CEO of Apple, died, and I found a tech world still grieving the loss of its superstar. The industry was bereft of a figure who could command the world’s attention with the twitch of a stage-managed eyebrow, a man who could send the media into conniptions with an addendum to a slide show. Silicon Valley was frantically searching for one more thing, but results had been mixed.
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That was a huge bet he made, and it worked,” Musk said in 2013. Management books tend to be written by management consultants who study companies during their times of peace, Horowitz cautioned. Other than Grove’s writing, he didn’t know of any books that taught people how to manage in wartime like Steve Jobs. When Jobs returned to Apple as interim CEO in 1997, the company was months away from bankruptcy. Four years later, it released the iPod. On May 8, 2013, Tesla reported its first quarterly profit. There had been many start-ups over the decades, but, at last, an electric car company was selling enough cars to stay in business.
pages: 270 words: 79,992 The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele
4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, old-boy network, peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar
The quotation is taken from his essay “We Owe It All to the Hippies,” Time, 1 Mar. 1995. 13. http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/peoples-computer/peoples-1972-oct/index.html 14. http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/homebrew_and_how_the_apple.php 15. http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_01/index.html 16. http://www.gadgetspage.com/comps-peripheral/apple-i-computer-ad.html 17. John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Penguin, 1996). 18. http://pdgmag.com/2012/02/02/steve-jobs-lee-clow-and-ridley-scott-the-three-geniuses-who-made-1984-less-like-1984/ 19. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8 20. Adelia Cellini, “The Story Behind Apple’s ‘1984’ TV Commercial: Big Brother at 20.”
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We’ve simply subjected the world to our designs, leaving everyone else to live with the consequences, whether or not we like them. Technology seems value-neutral, yet it isn’t. It has its own worldview, one the rest of us adopt without consideration because of the convenience and fun of our communications devices. People worship Steve Jobs and his legendary leadership of Apple, and they consume Apple products such as the iPhone and iPad with delight and intensity—yet these products and indeed the vision of Jobs are reorganizing our world from top to bottom. The nerds who brought you today’s three most dominant communications technologies—the personal computer, the Internet, and mobile phones—were in different ways self-consciously hostile to established authority and self-consciously alert to the vast promise and potential of individual human beings.
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Years later, after the PC was an established reality, Ken Olson, the founder of minicomputer maker Digital Equipment Corporation, still … publicly asserted that there was no need for a home computer.”17 On the other hand, antiestablishment ideology became entrenched in manifold specifics of the PC’s design; Markoff relates, for instance, that the visualization that comes with iTunes—the pretty colors that move and change in sequence with the music—was inspired in part by Jobs’s use of LSD, which Jobs called “one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life.” A liberationist ethic also became entrenched in the overt marketing of personal computing devices, most famously in a classic television commercial, Apple’s 1984 spot. Following the rousing success of Apple’s first two home computer models, Steve Jobs wanted to do something big to roll out its third model, the Macintosh personal computer. He hired Ridley Scott, who two years earlier had directed the sci-fi classic Bladerunner, to make the commercial.18 The result was a powerful and intense ad that referenced the dystopian future of George Orwell’s classic novel 1984.
pages: 807 words: 154,435 Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future by Mervyn King, John Kay
"Robert Solow", Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, algorithmic trading, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 737 MAX, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, eat what you kill, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, Goodhart's law, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, oil shock, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, popular electronics, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez crisis 1956, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game
Apple machines had screens with icons which created the appearance of a desktop, and friendly aids such as a mouse and trash bin – innovations that seemed like gimmicks to the nerds who then predominated among computer users, but which opened computing to a much wider audience. Apple machines were more fun. But you could access these capabilities only by buying Apple’s integrated software and hardware. Apple’s determination to maintain its proprietary system failed in the face of widespread adoption of the more open standard of the IBM PC: Windows, a combination of Apple’s graphical user interface with Microsoft’s ubiquitous MS-DOS, swept the world, and almost swept Apple from that world. By the mid-1990s, Apple was on the edge of bankruptcy, its market share falling, its innovations failing. But 1997 was the year of the Second Coming of Steve Jobs (he had been forced out of the company a decade earlier by the board).
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When IBM attempted to regain control with a new and more sophisticated operating system, OS/2, it was too late. MS-DOS (powering Windows 3.1) was everywhere. Meanwhile, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak began assembling Apple machines in 1976 in Jobs’s garage, now designated a historic site. 18 Although Gates and Microsoft had understood that ease of use was as important as technical sophistication to commercial success, Jobs extended this vision further and conceived a computer that you could use without understanding anything about computers. To achieve this goal, Jobs drew on another invention from Xerox Parc – the graphical user interface. Apple machines had screens with icons which created the appearance of a desktop, and friendly aids such as a mouse and trash bin – innovations that seemed like gimmicks to the nerds who then predominated among computer users, but which opened computing to a much wider audience.
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But in the right circumstances – those of 1940 – Churchill’s optimism and confidence were vital. Steve Jobs similarly failed to conform to the conventional depiction of ‘rational’ behaviour under uncertainty. Just as Churchill became premier with no specific plan for how the war would develop, Jobs returned to Apple content to wait for ‘the next big thing’. Jobs’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, writes of his subject’s ‘reality distortion field’. The phrase was adopted from Star Trek by one of Apple’s first software designers, who identified his CEO’s approach as ‘a confounding melange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand’ – characteristics similar to those identified by Churchill’s biographers. 33 Strikingly, however, the first half of Isaacson’s book, which deals with the period prior to Jobs’s 1997 return to Apple, contains sixteen references to the ‘reality distortion field’, the remainder contains only three.
pages: 266 words: 87,411 The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed by Carl Honore
Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Atul Gawande, Broken windows theory, call centre, Checklist Manifesto, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, drone strike, Enrique Peñalosa, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, game design, income inequality, index card, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, lone genius, medical malpractice, microcredit, Netflix Prize, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty
Like McNutt, his motto was: “The good God is in the detail.” Steve Jobs, founder and former CEO of Apple, took that creed to the level of obsessive compulsion. Towards the end of his life, as he lay dying in hospital, he burned through 67 nurses before settling on three that met his exacting standards. Even when heavily sedated, he tore an oxygen mask off his face to object to the way it looked. The pulmonologist was startled when Jobs demanded to see five other mask designs so he could pick the one he liked best. Yet what sounds like a rampant case of OCD helped turn Apple into one of the most successful companies in history.
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You have to find and marshal the right people, and then manage the creative collisions that ensue. But it works even in the fastest-moving sectors of the economy. Steve Jobs once observed that Apple’s revolutionary Macintosh computer “turned out so well because the people working on it were musicians, artists, poets and historians who also happened to be excellent computer scientists.” Nearly three decades later the company is still thrashing the competition with the same recipe. “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough,” Jobs declared after the launch of the world-conquering iPad. “It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.”
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“He knows how to walk that tightrope of giving us the freedom to contribute our own ideas while also bringing us all along together down a single path.” Not all successful leaders have a mother’s heart. Steve Jobs is the classic counter-example. Apple insiders described him as a tyrannical control freak who could be obnoxiously rude to his staff, shouting them down, passing off their ideas as his own, displaying zero interest in their private lives. Would Apple have thrived even more had his EI matched his IQ? We will never know. But perhaps Jobs was that very rare thing: a genius you walked away from at your peril. To what extent lesser mortals can work the Mr Nasty leadership style is up for debate, but there is no doubt that fixing a complex problem often depends on a driving, central figure.
pages: 374 words: 89,725 A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas by Warren Berger
Airbnb, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fear of failure, Google X / Alphabet X, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Thomas L Friedman, Toyota Production System, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar
Maura O’Neill, “Disruptive Innovation Often Comes from Unexpected Places,” Huffington Post, January 25, 2013. 7 the late cofounder of Apple, Steve Jobs . . . Jobs’s interest in shoshin and other Zen principles has been chronicled in a number of places, including Walter Isaacson’s biography Steve Jobs (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011); as well as Daniel Burke, “Steve Jobs’ Private Spirituality Now an Open Book,” USA Today, November 2, 2011; and my own article for Fast Company, “What Zen Taught Steve Jobs (and Silicon Valley) about Innovation,” April 9, 2012, http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669387/what-zen-taught-silicon-valley-and-steve-jobs-about-innovation. 8 a bit of ancient wisdom, brought to . . .
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The company figured that the only way to pull off something as audacious as this was through a partnership with a tech company. Striking a collaborative deal with Steve Jobs and Apple wasn’t easy. (According to a press report, Jobs initially berated Nike chief executive9 Mark Parker for trying to expand into digital; stick to the sneakers was Jobs’s message, with a profanity or two thrown in.) But eventually, Nike won over Jobs and produced a hybrid product, Nike+, which wirelessly connected a Nike running shoe to an Apple iPod device, which was in turn connected to a website. A classic “smart recombination,” it enabled the runner to program music, track running and health data, communicate with other runners, find running partners, share tips, and so forth.
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Many businesspeople seemed to be aware, on some level, of a link between questioning and innovation. They understood that great products, companies, even industries, often begin with a question. It’s well-known that Google, as described by its chairman, is a company that “runs on questions,”2 and that business stars such as the late Steve Jobs of Apple and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos made their mark by questioning everything. Yet, as I began to explore this subject within the business sector, I found few companies that actually encouraged questioning in any substantive way. There were no departments or training programs focused on questioning; no policies, guidelines, best practices.
pages: 744 words: 142,748 Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell by Phil Lapsley
air freight, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, card file, cuban missile crisis, dumpster diving, Garrett Hardin, Hush-A-Phone, index card, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Markoff, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, undersea cable, urban renewal, wikimedia commons
Thanks to Charley and some software Draper had written, some of phone phreaking’s drudgery was eliminated; what Charlie Pyne and Jake Locke had to do with their index fingers at Harvard in the 1960s—dialing thousands of numbers and listening for dial tones—an Apple II could now do automatically. According to Wozniak, Draper cracked some twenty WATS extenders by Charley’s brute-force dialing of codes while Draper was working at Apple. All this did not sit well with Steve Jobs and the other managers at Apple, who thought the Charley Board product was a bit too risky and, besides, they disliked Draper to begin with. Charley was shelved. Draper left Apple and moved from California to rural Pennsylvania to work at a friend’s company designing a product for the emerging cable television industry.
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Riches, or promises of riches, or maybe just a fun job that might pay the bills beckoned. In 1976 former phone phreaks Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were selling Apple I computers to their fellow hobbyists. “Jobs placed ads in hobbyist publications and they began selling Apples for the price of $666.66,” journalist Steven Levy wrote. “Anyone in Homebrew could take a look at the schematics for the design, Woz’s BASIC was given away free with the purchase of a piece of equipment that connected the computer to a cassette recorder.” The fully assembled and tested Apple II followed later that year. By 1977 microcomputers had begun to enter the mainstream.
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And it made me want to have more of those adventures by designing more things like my blue box, weird things that worked in ways that people didn’t expect. For the rest of my life, that was the reason I kept doing project after project after project, usually with Steve Jobs. You could trace it right up to the Apple II computer. It was the start of wanting to constantly design things very, very well and get noticed for it. Steve and I were a team from that day on. He once said that Apple wouldn’t have existed without the blue box, and I agree. Today a lot of people are computer hackers and a lot of them just want to cause problems for others—they’re like vandals. I was not a vandal, I was just curious.
pages: 390 words: 109,519 Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media by Tarleton Gillespie
4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, borderless world, Burning Man, complexity theory, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, do what you love, Donald Trump, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, eternal september, Filter Bubble, game design, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jean Tirole, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral panic, multi-sided market, Netflix Prize, Network effects, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Telecommunications Act of 1996, two-sided market, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler
See also “Average App Store Review Times,” http://appreviewtimes.com/. 25Laura McGann, “Mark Fiore Can Win a Pulitzer Prize, but He Can’t Get his iPhone Cartoon App Past Apple’s Satire Police,” Nieman Lab, April 15, 2010. http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/04/mark-fiore-can-win-a-pulitzer-prize-but-he-cant-get-his-iphone-cartoon-app-past-apples-satire-police/. 26Gabe Jacobs, “Bushisms iPhone App Rejected,” Gabe Jacobs Blog, September 13, 2008, http://www.gabejacobsblog.com/2008/09/13/bushisms-iphone-app-rejected/ (no longer available online); Alec, “Freedom Time Rejected by Apple for App Store,” Juggleware Dev Blog, September 21, 2008, https://www.juggleware.com/blog/2008/09/freedomtime-rejected-by-apple-for-app-store/. 27Robin Wauters, “Apple Rejects Obama Trampoline iPhone App, Leaves Us Puzzled,” TechCrunch, February 7, 2009, http://techcrunch.com/2009/02/07/apple-rejects-obama-trampoline-iphone-app-leaves-us-puzzled/; Don Bora, “Rejected App (Biden’s Teeth),” Eight Bit Blog, June 6, 2009, http://blog.eightbitstudios.com/rejected-app. 28“iSinglePayer iPhone App Censored by Apple,” Lambda Jive, September 26, 2009, http://lambdajive.wordpress.com/2009/09/. 29Alec, “Steve Jobs Responds,” Juggleware Dev Blog, September 23, 2008, http://www.juggleware.com/blog/2008/09/steve-jobs-writes-back/. 30Ryan Singel, “Jobs Rewrites History about Apple Ban on Satire,” Wired, June 3, 2010, https://www.wired.com/2010/06/jobs-apple-satire-ban/. 31Alexia Tsotsis, “WikiLeaks iPhone App Made $5,840 before Pulled by Apple, $1 From Each Sale Will Be Donated to WikiLeaks,” TechCrunch, December 22, 2010, https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/22/wikileaks-2/. 32Rebecca Greenfield, “Apple Rejected the Drone Tracker App Because It Could,” Atlantic, August 30, 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/08/apple-rejected-drone-tracker-app-because-it-could/324120/. 33Ryan Chittum, “Apple’s Speech Policies Should Still Worry the Press,” Columbia Journalism Review, April 20, 2010, http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/apples_speech_policies_should.php. 34Charles Christensen, “iPad Publishing No Savior for Small Press, LGBT Comics Creators,” Prism Comics, June 2010, http://prismcomics.org/display.php?
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So only certain providers have voluntarily taken on this burden. Among the largest social media platforms, Apple’s App Store is the only one that has instituted a review mechanism for user-provided content that precedes the content’s being made available. For Apple, this was extremely important. Ensuring the user “freedom from porn,” as Steve Jobs notoriously promised, was just part of the broader promise of the iPhone and iPad.14 Apple wanted the feel and experience of each device to seamlessly extend to the apps designed for it. Imposing a review process for third-party apps, to ensure that they meet Apple’s standards of technical quality and design but also of propriety, was a way to protect the Apple brand—by extending the boundaries of the commodity itself to include not just the iPhone or iPad but a carefully moderated set of apps for them.
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The Birth of the Bleep and Modern American Censorship,” Verge, August 27, 2013, https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/27/4545388/curses-the-birth-of-the-bleep-and-modern-american-censorship. 13Horwitz, “The First Amendment Meets Some New Technologies”; Lane, The Decency Wars. 14Ryan Tate, “Steve Jobs Offers World ‘Freedom from Porn,’” Gawker, May 15, 2010, http://gawker.com/5539717/steve-jobs-offers-world-freedom-from-porn. 15Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It; Grimmelman and Ohm, “Dr. Generative”; Steven Johnson, “Everybody’s Business—How Apple Has Rethought a Gospel of the Web,” New York Times, April 10, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/technology/internet/11every.html. 16Hestres, “App Neutrality.” 17Weber, The Success of Open Source; Fred von Lohmann, “All Your Apps Are Belong to Apple: The iPhone Developer Program License Agreement,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, March 9, 2010, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/03/iphone-developer-program-license-agreement-all. 18Rogers, “Jailbroken.” 19Nick Statt, “US Government Says It’s Now Okay to Jailbreak Your Tablet and Smart TV,” Verge, October 27, 2015, http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/27/9622066/jailbreak-unlocked-tablet-smart-tvs-dmca-exemption-library-of-congress. 20Boudreau and Hagiu, “Platform Rules.” 21Morris and Elkins, “There’s a History for That”; Nieborg, “Crushing Candy.” 22Elaluf-Calderwood et al., “Control as a Strategy”; Tiwana, Konsynski, and Bush, “Platform Evolution.” 23Barzilai-Nahon, “Toward a Theory of Network Gatekeeping.” 24Graham Spencer, “Developers: Apple’s App Review Needs Big Improvements,” MacStories, March 1, 2016, https://www.macstories.net/stories/developers-apples-app-review-needs-big-improvements/.
pages: 304 words: 82,395 Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, Kenneth Cukier
23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Swan, book scanning, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, double entry bookkeeping, Eratosthenes, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, obamacare, optical character recognition, PageRank, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, post-materialism, random walk, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!
Whenever a new marker is discovered, a person’s DNA (or more precisely, the relevant part of it) has to be sequenced again. Working with a subset, rather than the whole, entails a tradeoff: the company can find what it is looking for faster and more cheaply, but it can’t answer questions that it didn’t consider in advance. Apple’s legendary chief executive Steve Jobs took a totally different approach in his fight against cancer. He became one of the first people in the world to have his entire DNA sequenced as well as that of his tumor. To do this, he paid a six-figure sum—many hundreds of times more than the price 23andMe charges. In return, he received not a sample, a mere set of markers, but a data file containing the entire genetic codes.
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Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. That data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company.” Brilliance doesn’t depend on data. Steve Jobs may have continually improved the Mac laptop over years on the basis of field reports, but he used his intuition, not data, to launch the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. He relied on his sixth sense. “It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want,” he famously said, when telling a reporter that Apple did no market research before releasing the iPad. In the book Seeing Like a State, the anthropologist James Scott of Yale University documents the ways in which governments, in their fetish for quantification and data, end up making people’s lives miserable rather than better.
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Ironically, Google’s co-founders wanted to hire Steve Jobs as CEO (despite his lack of a college degree); Levy, p. 80. Testing 41 gradations of blue—Laura M. Holson, “Putting a Bolder Face on Google,” New York Times, March 1, 2009 (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/business/01marissa.html). Google’s chief designer’s resignation—Quotation is excerpted (without ellipses for readability) from Doug Bowman, “Goodbye, Google,” blog post, March 20, 2009 (http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html). [>] Jobs quotation—Steve Lohr, “Can Apple Find More Hits Without Its Tastemaker?” New York Times, January 18, 2011, p.
pages: 242 words: 68,019 Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, From Atoms to Economies by Cesar Hidalgo
"Robert Solow", Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, assortative mating, business cycle, Claude Shannon: information theory, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, New Economic Geography, Norbert Wiener, p-value, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, price mechanism, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, working-age population
While personal computers tend to have an identifiable brand, different firms design and manufacture different parts of a finished computer. Even Apple’s devices, which are proudly designed in California, contain parts—such as their displays—that are designed and manufactured by others, including Apple’s nemesis, Samsung.8 In fact, soon after Steve Jobs returned to Apple he begun to outsource the manufacturing of devices, relying heavily on technologies from other firms.9 The iPod was made possible by a small hard drive that was invented by Toshiba. The Gorilla Glass screen of the iPhone was the brainchild of Corning, a glass manufacturer in upstate New York. What is true for Apple products is also true for many other modern devices.
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Silicon Valley’s knowledge and knowhow are not contained in a collection of perennially unemployed experts but rather in the experts working in firms that participate in the design and development of software and hardware. In fact, the histories of most firms in Silicon Valley are highly interwoven. Steve Jobs worked at Atari and Steve Wozniak worked at HP before starting Apple. As mentioned previously, Steve Jobs is also famously known for “borrowing” the ideas of a graphical user interface and object-oriented programming from Xerox PARC. If HP, Atari, and Xerox PARC had not been located in the valley, it is likely that the knowledge and knowhow needed to get Apple started would not have been there, either. Hence, industries that require subsets of the knowledge and knowhow needed in other industries represent essential stepping-stones in the process of industrial diversification.
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So social institutions affect not only the size of the networks that people form but also their adaptability, and this helped Silicon Valley leave Route 128 in the dust.15 Silicon Valley’s porous boundaries and adaptability are exemplified in Steve Jobs’ famous visit to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC) in late 1979. It was there that Jobs learned about graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and object-oriented programming. Ultimately Apple, not Xerox, was the company that succeeded in commercializing these technologies. Intellectual property purists might complain about Apple and not Xerox profiting from these ideas, but a more pragmatic view holds that it was better for the long-term sustainability of Silicon Valley to have Apple (or anyone, for that matter) develop and commercialize ideas that otherwise could have died in the inboxes of Xerox’s managers or, worse, might have been commercialized by a company in a competing cluster.
pages: 370 words: 129,096 Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance
addicted to oil, Burning Man, cleantech, digital map, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, global supply chain, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, money market fund, multiplanetary species, optical character recognition, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pneumatic tube, pre–internet, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Virgin Galactic, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize
The cosmetic issues, though, were minor compared to a tumultuous set of internal circumstances, revealed in detail here for the first time, that threatened to bankrupt the company once again. Musk had hired George Blankenship, a former Apple executive, to run its stores and service-center operations. At Apple, Blankenship worked just a couple of doors down from Steve Jobs and received credit for building much of the Apple Store strategy. When Tesla first hired Blankenship, the press and public were atwitter, anticipating that’d he do something spectacular and at odds with the traditions of the automotive industry. Blankenship did some of that. He expanded Tesla’s number of stores throughout the world and imbued them with that Apple Store vibe. Along with showcasing the Model S, the Tesla stores sold hoodies and hats and had areas in the back where kids would find crayons and Tesla coloring books.
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*At some point from late 2007 to 2008, Musk also tried to hire Tony Fadell, an executive at Apple who is credited with bringing the iPod and iPhone to life. Fadell remembered being recruited for the CEO job at Tesla, while Musk remembered it more as a chief operating officer type of position. “Elon and I had multiple discussions about me joining as Tesla’s CEO, and he even went to the lengths of staging a surprise party for me when I was going to visit their offices,” Fadell said. Steve Jobs caught wind of these meetings and turned on the charm to keep Fadell. “He was sure nice to me for a while,” Fadell said. A couple of years later, Fadell left Apple to found Nest, a maker of smart-home devices, which Google then acquired in 2014.
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SpaceX flew a supply capsule to the International Space Station and brought it safely back to Earth. Tesla Motors delivered the Model S, a beautiful, all-electric sedan that took the automotive industry’s breath away and slapped Detroit sober. These two feats elevated Musk to the rarest heights among business titans. Only Steve Jobs could claim similar achievements in two such different industries, sometimes putting out a new Apple product and a blockbuster Pixar movie in the same year. And yet, Musk was not done. He was also the chairman and largest shareholder of SolarCity, a booming solar energy company poised to file for an initial public offering. Musk had somehow delivered the biggest advances the space, automotive, and energy industries had seen in decades in what felt like one fell swoop.
pages: 468 words: 233,091 Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston
8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apple II, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business cycle, business process, Byte Shop, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, don't be evil, eat what you kill, fear of failure, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, game design, Googley, Hacker News, HyperCard, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Larry Wall, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, nuclear winter, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, software patent, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine, web application, Y Combinator
C H A P T 3 E R Steve Wozniak Cofounder, Apple Computer If any one person can be said to have set off the personal computer revolution, it might be Steve Wozniak. He designed the machine that crystallized what a desktop computer was: the Apple II. Wozniak and Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer in 1976. Between Wozniak’s technical ability and Jobs’s mesmerizing energy, they were a powerful team. Woz first showed off his home-built computer, the Apple I, at Silicon Valley’s Homebrew Computer Club in 1976. After Jobs landed a contract with the Byte Shop, a local computer store, for 100 preassembled machines, Apple was launched on a rapid ascent.
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We wanted to be able to demonstrate that you could use the same technology on the screen that you used on the printed page. Apple had actually been working on that for a while. Their technology was called TrueType. We were trying to market our solution to Apple, not with a lot of success. By then Steve Jobs had left. He’d been the primary Adobe champion inside Apple. Now Jean-Louis Gassée had taken over the product side of the business, and for whatever reason, Jean-Louis and Adobe never got along. So we were beginning to really have a problem with Apple. They were getting tired of paying us royalties for the LaserWriter; they thought that they shouldn’t have to pay anymore.
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It was sad to see him go because he supported good people so well in the company. Steve Wozniak 47 Livingston: What about Ron Wayne? Wasn’t he one of the founders? Wozniak: Yes, but not when we incorporated as a real company. We had two phases. One was as a partnership with Steve Jobs for the Apple I, and then for the Apple II, we became a corporation, Apple Computer, Incorporated. Steve knew Ron at Atari and liked him. Ron was a super-conservative guy. I didn’t know anything about politics of any sort; I avoided it. But he had read all these right-wing books like None Dare Call it Treason, and he could rattle the stuff off.
pages: 554 words: 149,489 The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change by Bharat Anand
Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Eyjafjallajökull, fulfillment center, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, managed futures, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Minecraft, multi-sided market, Network effects, post-work, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, two-sided market, ubercab, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game
“insanely great” This is how Steve Jobs famously referred to the Macintosh at its launch event in 1984, and subsequently to many new products; see also Jessie Hartland, Steve Jobs: Insanely Great (New York: Schwartz & Wade, 2015); Billboard Staff, “Steve Jobs: A Collection of His Classic Quotes,” Billboard , last modified October 5, 2011. the iPod wasn’t the first Daryl Deino, “Five Portable Mp3 Players That Arrived Before the iPod,” Examiner.com , May 25, 2013, accessed June 7, 2016, http://www.examiner.com/list/five-portable-mp3-players-that-arrived-before-the-ipod . Between 2002 and 2013 more than ten billion songs “iTunes Store Tops 10 Billion Songs Sold,” Apple press information, Apple.com, February 25, 2010, accessed June 7, 2016, https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/02/25iTunes-Store-Tops-10-Billion-Songs-Sold.html.
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,” AppleInsider, October 11, 2007, accessed June 7, 2016, http://appleinsider.com/articles/07/10/11/ipod_classic_the_last_hurrah_for_hdd_based_ipods ; MacNN staff, “iPod Classic May Be a ‘Stopgap’ Device,” MacNN, October 11, 2007, accessed June 7, 2016, http://www.macnn.com/articles/07/10/11/ipod.classic.teardown/ . “Thoughts on Music”…“DRM Free”…“create a truly interoperable music marketplace” Memorandum by Steve Jobs, “Thoughts on Music,” originally published on Apple’s website, February 6, 2007, accessed March 30, 2016, http://web.archive.org/web/20080517114107/; http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic. the numbers hadn’t increased much “Apple’s iTunes Store Passes 35 Billion Songs Sold Milestone,” MacDailyNews, May 29, 2014, accessed March 30, 2016; http://mac -dailynews.com/2014/05/29/apples-itunes-store-passes-35-billion-songs-sold-milestone-itunes-radio-now-has-40-million-listeners/ .
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To understand how profound the consequences of these differences are, look no further than Apple—and its checkered history. Figure 5: Traditional Versus Networked Products DIRECT VERSUS INDIRECT NETWORKS: AND, WHEN STEVE JOBS FAILED Ask anyone about Apple’s unprecedented successes—its “i-triumphs”—of the past decade and you’ll hear about superb products, beautiful designs, and cool marketing. The same formula is generally considered key in media markets and many other businesses, from cars to clothes and hotels. But Apple had followed this formula for the better part of two decades in its battle with Microsoft for global leadership in personal computers—and lost.
pages: 284 words: 92,688 Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons
activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, call centre, cleantech, cloud computing, content marketing, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, dumpster diving, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, Googley, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, pre–internet, quantitative easing, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, telemarketer, tulip mania, uber lyft, Y Combinator, éminence grise
Many of these people have never worked anywhere else. A lot of them aren’t very good. But here, they’re in charge. And I’m stuck working under them. Eight The Bozo Explosion Apple CEO Steve Jobs used to talk about a phenomenon called a “bozo explosion,” by which a company’s mediocre early hires rise up through the ranks and end up running departments. The bozos now must hire other people, and of course they prefer to hire bozos. As Guy Kawasaki, who worked with Jobs at Apple, puts it: “B players hire C players, so they can feel superior to them, and C players hire D players.” That’s the bozo explosion, and that’s what I believe has happened at HubSpot in the course of the last seven years.
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We were getting in on the ground floor of what would become a huge new market. In the 1980s Silicon Valley technology companies were boring places where engineers worked in drab office parks writing software or designing semiconductors and circuit boards and network routers. There weren’t any celebrities, other than Steve Jobs at Apple, and even he wasn’t such a big deal back then. In the early 1990s the Internet era began, and Silicon Valley changed. The new companies were flimsy, based on hype and grandiose rhetoric and the promise of making a fortune overnight. The dotcom boom of the late 1990s was followed by the dotcom bust, and then came a period when Silicon Valley felt like a ghost town.
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Then he will pause, as if he has just said something incredibly profound and wants to give you a moment to let it sink in. Then he repeats the line, and a ballroom full of marketing people cheer. But when I meet them together it occurs to me that their different personalities are probably why their partnership works. There’s a yin-and-yang quality, like the one between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the co-founders of Apple. Halligan is the Jobs figure, the corporate visionary, the guy who thinks about sales and marketing. Shah is like Woz, the nerdy software programmer. Shah is wearing scruffy jeans and a rumpled T-shirt, his usual attire. He has dark hair and a dark beard, flecked with gray.
The Buddha and the Badass: The Secret Spiritual Art of Succeeding at Work by Vishen Lakhiani
Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, data science, deliberate practice, do what you love, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, meta-analysis, microbiome, performance metric, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, web application, white picket fence
The destruction of the environment, the rise of nationalism, the health and obesity crisis, the fact that millions of people lack basic necessities like water or a decent education. Or even just making people’s lives better through good design, great products, and useful services. There is a famous story that shows how Steve Jobs used this tactic to motivate Apple engineers to speed up the start time of an early Mac. In his article “Saving Lives,” published in 1983, Andy Hertzfeld, one of the computer scientists on the original development team during the 1980s, writes: One of the things that bothered Steve Jobs the most was the time that it took to boot when the Mac was first powered on. It could take a couple of minutes, or even more, to test memory, initialize the operating system, and load the Finder.
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If these types of workers are in an organization, they move with fluidity and ease, nailing projects with a smile on their face. Getting the coveted raises and promotions. Many of them are able to handle multiple projects at once. Juggling dual roles and responsibilities while making each project thrive, much like Steve Jobs juggled the roles of being a leader at both Pixar and Apple. Yet the forces of overwhelm dare not touch them. These superstar workers are often able to get in the zone at ease, displaying remarkable focus and creativity. And producing great work at dizzying speeds, like how Elton John released four albums in a single year and became responsible for 5 percent of all the music sold globally that year.
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They bury them out of modesty or a desire to appeal to the status quo. But remember this: In most cases anyone can imitate your business. But nobody can imitate your business if it’s built based on YOUR STORY. When your values infuse your business, you’ve given a special life to your creation. Steve Jobs infused Apple with values of aesthetics in an era when personal computers were ugly. Oprah infused her talk shows with the values of love and healing in an era when talk shows were using scandal and family gossip to gain viewers. If you’re a founder or leader, you of all people can’t ignore that you have deeply held personal foundational values that are driving you.
pages: 801 words: 209,348 Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan
activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game
“Just One More Bubble”: “If You Can Make It in Silicon Valley, You Can Make It . . . in Silicon Valley Again,” New York Times, June 5, 2005. Chapter 35: Mobile from George Lucas: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 240. Tim Berners-Lee attributed: Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (San Francisco, Harper, 1999), 22–23. making Jobs a billionaire: John Markoff, “Apple Computer Co-Founder Strikes Gold with New Stock,” New York Times, November 30, 1995. Apple agreed to buy: Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 301. lose over $1 billion: Apple Computer Inc., Annual Report (Washington DC: Securities and Exchange Commission, 1997)
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individual songs via Apple: Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 402–3. $7.7 billion versus $7.4 billion and eighty million hands: Apple Computer Inc., 2007 Annual Report (Washington DC: Securities and Exchange Commission, 2007). Jobs took the stage and “Every once in a while”: Steve Jobs, Keynote presentation of the iPhone at Macworld, San Francisco, January 9, 2007. “the most expensive phone”: Steve Ballmer, interview at Nortel, Innovative Communications Alliance, Power Lunch, January 17, 2007. 600 million units: Apple Computer Inc., 2015 Annual Report (Washington DC: Securities and Exchange Commission, 2015). Silicon Valley’s Tesla: Claire Cain Miller, “An All-Electric Sedan, Awaiting Federal Aid,” New York Times, March 26, 2009.
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Thirty-five MOBILE It was clear to almost all that Apple Computer’s time had passed. Microsoft dominated the personal computer. Upstarts dominated Internet services. Computer manufacturers like Dell made fortunes from machines that ran Windows, Microsoft’s ubiquitous operating system. In comparison, Apple’s world in 1997 was not just niche but a dying niche. Steve Jobs’s company had lost the war. Jobs himself had been a founder in absentia for twelve years, having been fired in 1985. His failure with the launch of the Macintosh, underwhelming in its initial sales, had been the final death knell. Apple’s story then became a classic tale of an enigmatic, iconoclastic founder making way for seasoned business leadership.
Americana by Bhu Srinivasan
activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game
“Just One More Bubble”: “If You Can Make It in Silicon Valley, You Can Make It . . . in Silicon Valley Again,” New York Times, June 5, 2005. Chapter 35: Mobile from George Lucas: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 240. Tim Berners-Lee attributed: Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (San Francisco, Harper, 1999), 22–23. making Jobs a billionaire: John Markoff, “Apple Computer Co-Founder Strikes Gold with New Stock,” New York Times, November 30, 1995. Apple agreed to buy: Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 301. lose over $1 billion: Apple Computer Inc., Annual Report (Washington DC: Securities and Exchange Commission, 1997)
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individual songs via Apple: Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 402–3. $7.7 billion versus $7.4 billion and eighty million hands: Apple Computer Inc., 2007 Annual Report (Washington DC: Securities and Exchange Commission, 2007). Jobs took the stage and “Every once in a while”: Steve Jobs, Keynote presentation of the iPhone at Macworld, San Francisco, January 9, 2007. “the most expensive phone”: Steve Ballmer, interview at Nortel, Innovative Communications Alliance, Power Lunch, January 17, 2007. 600 million units: Apple Computer Inc., 2015 Annual Report (Washington DC: Securities and Exchange Commission, 2015). Silicon Valley’s Tesla: Claire Cain Miller, “An All-Electric Sedan, Awaiting Federal Aid,” New York Times, March 26, 2009.
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Thirty-five MOBILE It was clear to almost all that Apple Computer’s time had passed. Microsoft dominated the personal computer. Upstarts dominated Internet services. Computer manufacturers like Dell made fortunes from machines that ran Windows, Microsoft’s ubiquitous operating system. In comparison, Apple’s world in 1997 was not just niche but a dying niche. Steve Jobs’s company had lost the war. Jobs himself had been a founder in absentia for twelve years, having been fired in 1985. His failure with the launch of the Macintosh, underwhelming in its initial sales, had been the final death knell. Apple’s story then became a classic tale of an enigmatic, iconoclastic founder making way for seasoned business leadership.
pages: 94 words: 26,453 The End of Nice: How to Be Human in a World Run by Robots (Kindle Single) by Richard Newton
3D printing, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, crowdsourcing, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, future of work, Google Glasses, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Paul Erdős, Paul Graham, recommendation engine, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social intelligence, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Tyler Cowen, Y Combinator
He told Forbes magazine: “If there were moments I was stubborn in my life it was because I was really… REALLY believing in something that I wanted to see become a reality and every now and then people around me didn’t totally get it.” Selling and persuasion. That’s what it takes to put your vision into someone else’s head. At Apple they had a name for it. The Reality Distortion Field was the label they gave Steve Jobs’ pressure-selling charisma and its effect on those around him. You’ll have noticed something else about the list of successes a few paragraphs earlier. It’s how often they failed. And that’s the corollary of trying to innovate (or deviate) from the norm.
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It’s about crafting a life in the woods with Robin Hood rather than inside the castle with the Sheriff of Nottingham’s henchmen, joining Princess Leia’s rebels not Vader’s idiot stormtroopers. It’s about having a gleeful laugh and a gleam in your eye and learning the life-grabbing, Anti-Nice behaviour of Steve Jobs, Picasso, Peter Pan, Muhammad Ali and Houdini. In The Pirates of the Caribbean, James Norrington is the essentially decent, noble, honourable, and duty-driven Royal Navy captain whose decisions (and therefore whose life) is led according to rules made by the Admiralty in London. He sacrifices his personal happiness to do the “right” thing.
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To move against the forceful tide of our conditioning. It’s to be liberated from an attitude designed for different days. The choice in the end is a stark one: to be a servant to the Machine or a servant to your own creative potential. It’s what you call a “no-brainer”. …And one more thing, as Steve Jobs would say. At the same time as the Machine forces us into the corner where we can only work in ways it cannot, we are increasingly aware of the need to find satisfaction from our labour. Our ancestors worked to live: to provide a roof to live under and to put bread and water on the table. But now we, for all our financial hardships in recent years, are living an abundant life.
pages: 528 words: 146,459 Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan L. Ensmenger, Jeffrey R. Yost
Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Byte Shop, card file, cashless society, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer age, deskilling, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Jenner, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, garden city movement, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, Herman Kahn, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pirate software, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, Turing machine, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, young professional
Microsoft, which came late to the PDA/smartphone platform business by licensing Windows-based mobile operating systems, had some success in the enterprise market before smartphones became consumer oriented and the touchscreen-based Apple iOS and Android systems rose to dominance. While Apple’s Macintosh was a technical success at its launch in 1984, it helped Microsoft far more than Apple itself (by showing the dominant operating-system company the way to a user-friendly graphics-based operating system). Apple Computer was struggling as a company in the mid-1980s, and co-founder and Macintosh team leader Steve Jobs lost a boardroom battle, was isolated from Apple’s management, and elected to resign from the firm. In 1985 Jobs formed NeXT, a computer platform development company focused on the educational and business markets.
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Within months of its initial launch at the beginning of 1975, the Altair 8800 had itself been eclipsed by dozens of new models produced by firms such as Applied Computer Technology, IMSAI, North Star, Cromemco, and Vector. THE RISE OF APPLE COMPUTER Most of the new computer firms fell almost as quickly as they rose, and only a few survived beyond the mid-1980s. Apple Computer was the rare exception in that it made it into the Fortune 500 and achieved long-term global success. Its initial trajectory, however, was quite typical of the early hobbyist start-ups. Apple was founded by two young computer hobbyists, Stephen Wozniak and Steve Jobs. Wozniak grew up in Cupertino, California, in the heart of the booming West Coast electronics industry.
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Despite being a failure in commercial terms, the Xerox Star presented a vision that would transform the way people worked on computers in the 1980s. STEVE JOBS AND THE MACINTOSH In December 1979 Steve Jobs was invited to visit Xerox PARC. When he made his visit, the network of prototype Alto computers had just begun to demonstrate Xerox’s office-of-the-future concept, and he was in awe of what he saw. Larry Tesler, who demonstrated the machines, recalled Jobs demanding, “Why isn’t Xerox marketing this? . . . You could blow everybody away!” This was of course just what Xerox intended to do with the Xerox Star, which was then under development. Returning to Apple’s headquarters at Cupertino, Jobs convinced his colleagues that the company’s next computer would have to look like the machine he had seen at Xerox PARC.
pages: 706 words: 202,591 Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy
active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, cloud computing, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Firefox, Frank Gehry, glass ceiling, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product
Zuckerberg and Moskovitz urged Morin to join Facebook, but it was hard to leave Apple’s beautiful headquarters for a start-up crazytown in downtown Palo Alto. Once Moskovitz and Ezra Callahan visited Morin at Apple’s sprawling Infinite Loop campus. “This place is pretty nice,” they told him. “But one day we’ll be bigger.” Really? Morin thought. Come on! Morin tried to get his bosses at Apple excited about Facebook. His dream was for Apple to make a social operating system. Instead of organizing your system around files, why not around people? Maybe Apple could buy Facebook, as the basis of this new system. The matter came before CEO Steve Jobs. No go. Jobs was open to buying companies, but why join forces with a college-only site of a few million people when MySpace had fifty million?
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- • • • THERE WAS MORE than the usual move-fast imperative for Facebook to introduce its platform in a hurry. That January, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, to astonishment and acclaim, had introduced the iPhone. The announcement had created a frenzy, and people marked their calendars for the time in June when they would actually be able to buy one. In theory, the iPhone would not provide competition for Facebook’s platform. Steve Jobs had brushed off criticism that Apple was not allowing software developers to write applications directly to its operating system. In any case, Apple wanted nothing to do with social networks. But Facebook was wary of Jobs’s intent to close the iPhone to software developers.
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In brainstorming the event, Morin had a single template in mind: Steve Jobs’s celebrated Apple keynotes. To produce the graphics for Mark’s speech, Facebook used Ryan Spratt, who had worked so much on Jobs’s slides that Apple eventually gave him an office. To help conceptualize the message, Morin tapped Stone Yamashita Partners, a consultancy with extensive Apple experience. All of this would require something that Mark Zuckerberg had never done: keynoting a glitzy public event. Zuckerberg, of course, couldn’t be expected to match the glib elegance of Steve Jobs. “He’s an amazing communicator now, but in that time period he was still learning,” says Morin, perhaps overly kind in his current assessment.
pages: 368 words: 96,825 Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler
3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Boston Dynamics, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, dematerialisation, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, gravity well, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Jono Bacon, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, microbiome, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Oculus Rift, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, rolodex, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart grid, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, superconnector, technoutopianism, telepresence, telepresence robot, Turing test, urban renewal, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, web application, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game
These planes helped the United States win the cold war, of course, but their bigger impact was organizational: for the next half a century, whenever a company wanted to go bold, skunk was often the way innovation got done. Everyone from Raytheon and DuPont to Walmart and Nordstrom has gotten in on the skunk game. In the early 1980s, to offer another example, Apple cofounder Steve Jobs leased a building behind the Good Earth restaurant in Silicon Valley, stocked it with twenty brilliant designers, and created his own skunk works to build the first Macintosh computer.3 The division was set apart from Apple’s normal R&D department and led by Jobs himself. When people asked him why they needed this new facility, Jobs liked to say: “It is better to be a pirate than join the Navy.” The question is why.
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We’re taught that when you are given a choice you have to choose only one option. But why choose? All through graduate school I was told to either go to school or start a company. It was binary or bust. But not for me. In my case, the answer was both and then some. I started three companies while in graduate school. I started eight more before I was forty. Steve Jobs juggled both Apple and Pixar. Elon Musk runs three multibillion-dollar successes: Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and SolarCity. Branson, well, alongside his Virgin Management group, has started over five hundred companies, including eight billion-dollar companies in eight different industries. This multiple-choice approach—if properly managed—can create tremendous momentum.
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v=G-0KJF3uLP8. 31 “About Blue Origin,” Blue Origin, July 2014, http://www.blueorigin.com/about/. 32 Alistair Barr, “Amazon testing delivery by drone, CEO Bezos Says,” USA Today, December 2, 2013, referencing a 60 Minutes interview with Jeff Bezos, http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/12/01/amazon-bezos-drone-delivery/3799021/. 33 Jay Yarow, “Jeff Bezos’ Shareholder Letter Is Out,” Business Insider, April 10, 2014, http://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-shareholder-letter-2014-4. 34 “Larry Page Biography,” Academy of Achievement, January 21, 2011, http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/pag0bio-1. 35 Marcus Wohlsen, “Google Without Larry Page Would Not Be Like Apple Without Steve Jobs,” Wired, October 18, 2013, http://www.wired.com/2013/10/google-without-page/. 36 Google Inc., 2012, Form 10-K 2012, retrieved from SEC Edgar website: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312513028362/d452134d10k.htm. 37 Larry Page, “Beyond Today—Larry Page—Zeitgeist 2012,” Google Zeitgeist, Zeitgeist Minds, May 22, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?
pages: 303 words: 100,516 Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork by Reeves Wiedeman
Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, barriers to entry, Burning Man, call centre, carbon footprint, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital nomad, do what you love, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, fear of failure, Gavin Belson, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, index fund, Jeff Bezos, Lyft, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, the High Line, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game
Like many entrepreneurs, Adam admired Steve Jobs and all that he stood for—wild ambition, ruthless drive. But he warned that some aspects of Jobs’s revolution had come with a price. “Look where that got us: in a terrible recession,” Adam said. “The future is community.” America was preparing to reelect a former community organizer as president. Occupy Wall Street took over a park in lower Manhattan, and a sense persisted that the old world order no longer served humanity’s needs. WeWork was premised on the idea that even the most iconoclastic entrepreneurs couldn’t build a business without help. With Jobs having left Apple to deal with pancreatic cancer, Adam seemed eager to position his company as a rising star of the new economy and himself as a candidate for America’s next entrepreneur in chief.
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But the company was beginning to form itself in Adam’s image. For all his bluster, he could be an inspiring leader, pushing WeWork employees beyond their limits for the good of the cause and the promise of riches down the line. They compared his aura to the “reality distortion field” that an Apple employee once described as emanating from Steve Jobs, convincing anyone within its radius that the impossible was not only plausible, but exactly what they were going to do. After several workers installed a large stone table in a Manhattan WeWork, one employee noticed smears of blood left behind by one of the workers, which felt poetic.
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“Children are ready to start creating their life’s work when they’re five.” It was only a matter of time before the first WeGrow-educated entrepreneurs would need their own WeWork office. WeGrow made more sense to the company’s employees than a wave pool, but only slightly. What did they know about educating children? Steve Jobs had once asked his most senior employees to come up with a list of Apple’s top ten priorities, then said the company could manage only three. The Neumanns didn’t seem to share that sense of focus—apartments, wave pools, schools—and it was becoming difficult to see how the company could possibly develop an expertise in the range of businesses it was entering while still maintaining the growth of its core office-leasing operation.
pages: 292 words: 85,151 Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest
23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game
Founded in June 2010 and focused on low-end Android smartphones, the company sold twenty million handsets in 2013, recording annual revenues of more than $5 billion. Lei Jun, one of the founders, is seen as a Chinese Steve Jobs. That’s not just because he’s been heavily inspired by Apple’s design, marketing and supply chain management, but also because of Xiaomi’s intense focus on performance, quality and customer experience—characteristics that Lei Jun wants to make available to everyone at affordable prices. Xiaomi offers a curated Apple smartphone experience with the software development, speed and processes of Google Android, all at a low price. The company currently outsells Apple in China and is closing in on Samsung. Its products are available in four Asian countries and the company plans to expand to ten more emerging markets, including India and Brazil.
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We are information-enabling everything. An information-enabled environment delivers fundamentally disruptive opportunities. Even traditional industries are ripe for disruption. CHAPTER TWO A Tale of Two Companies In one of the most iconic moments in modern business history, Steve Jobs rocked the world in January 2007 with his announcement of the Apple iPhone, which debuted six months later. Literally everything in high tech changed that day—indeed, you might even call it a Singularity—as all existing strategies in consumer electronics were instantly rendered obsolete. At that moment, the entire future of the digital world had to be reconsidered.
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Unfortunately for Nokia, a small Israeli company called Waze was founded around the same time. Instead of making a massive capital investment in in-road sensor hardware, the founders of Waze chose instead to crowdsource location information by leveraging the GPS sensors on its users’ phones—the new world of smartphones just announced at Apple by Steve Jobs—to capture traffic information. Within two years, Waze was gathering traffic data from as many sources as Navteq had road sensors, and within four years it had ten times as many sources. What’s more, the cost of adding each new source was essentially zero, not to mention that Waze’s users regularly upgraded their phones—and thus Waze’s information base.
pages: 308 words: 85,880 How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen
23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, Charles Babbage, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar
This crisis of our elites explains not only the scarcity of trust bedeviling most advanced democracies but also the populist ressentiment on both left and right, against the traditional ruling class. Yet it also feels as if we are all losing touch with something more essential than just the twentieth-century establishment. Losing touch with ourselves, perhaps. And with what it means to be human in an age of bewilderingly fast change. As Steve Jobs used to say, teasing his audience before unveiling one of Apple’s magical new products, there’s “one more thing” to talk about here. And it’s the biggest thing of all in our contemporary world. It is the digital revolution, the global hyperconnectivity powered by the internet, that lies behind much of the disruption. In 2016, I participated in a two-day World Economic Forum (WEF) workshop in New York City about the “digital transformation” of the world.
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Lick-lider,1 is considered a father of the internet—chose to name his new science after kybernetes. Networked technology, Wiener initially believed, could steer or pilot us to a better world. This assumption, which Wiener shared not only with Bush and Licklider, but with many other twentieth-century visionaries—including Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the cofounders of Apple—was based on the conviction that this new technology would empower us with agency to change our societies. “You’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984,’” promised the iconic Super Bowl XVIII advertisement about the transformative power of Jobs’s and Wozniak’s new desktop computer.
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This will be the greatest question of the twenty-first century and Bezos has both the financial resources and the intellectual discipline to confront this astonishingly complex issue. I sense that Bezos is only now really breaking into his stride as a public figure. Like Steve Jobs, he is a man of superhuman ambitions and abilities. With Apple, Amazon—which Jeff Bezos founded in 1994—remains the most remarkable American company of the last half century. But if Bezos wants to be remembered by future generations, he should worry about jobs rather than e-commerce. Building the “Everything Store” is one thing; fixing the future is quite another.
pages: 190 words: 62,941 Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination by Adam Lashinsky
"side hustle", Airbnb, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google X / Alphabet X, hustle culture, independent contractor, information retrieval, Jeff Bezos, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, new economy, pattern recognition, price mechanism, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, young professional
Like other hands-on CEOs before him, Kalanick views his company’s offices not only as a reflection of the company’s values and aspirations, but as an extension of his own personality. Steve Jobs was the same way. Six months before his death he sat down on a couch next to me in his Palo Alto living room and proudly showed me a bound book of architectural drawings for the new Apple corporate campus he wouldn’t live to see. Months later he personally worked with an arborist to pick the apricot trees for the project. Kalanick, a few years younger than Jobs was when he returned to Apple for his second and final run, was communicating that to understand Uber’s work space was to understand Uber itself.
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But the place he sought entry into is an unreal world, as removed as one can be from the pedestrian life of Uzbek hacks in Queens. Indeed, though Kalanick blanches at acknowledging any influences, obsessing over the “kerning” of a logo is exactly what Steve Jobs did at Apple. And he was revered for it. Kalanick never met Jobs, but everyone in Silicon Valley can recite the lines from the hymnal of how Jobs wouldn’t rest until every font, typeface, and finely beveled edge had reached perfection. The Apple CEO was a master at instilling cognitive dissonance, persuading customers to overlook (usually fixable) defects in his products as well as the troubling working conditions of the contractors who made them.
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All the same, Kalanick was present nearly at the creation of Uber, and he supplied the critical insight that transformed someone else’s idea from merely interesting to undeniably groundbreaking. He has been Uber’s iron-fisted, omnipresent CEO from the time it first gained traction and began expanding beyond San Francisco. As a result, Uber has become as identified with Kalanick as Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook are with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg, respectively. Whether or not Uber becomes as powerful and highly valued as these enduring technology-industry titans, its CEO already has become an object of fascination and, for many, repulsion. In the short period that Uber went from an idea to the biggest of the so-called unicorns—privately held start-ups valued at more than $1 billion, once a rarity—Kalanick became world famous for his ruthlessness, lack of empathy, and willingness to flout anybody else’s rules.
pages: 344 words: 104,077 Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together by Thomas W. Malone
agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asperger Syndrome, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, business process, call centre, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, happiness index / gross national happiness, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Rulifson, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, prediction markets, price mechanism, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Coase, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!
So at least in the sense of being aware of and responsive to its environment, I think we would have to conclude that Apple is indeed conscious. Self-Awareness Apple is certainly aware of many aspects of itself and its corporate identity. From financial statements to market-share data, it constantly monitors many measures of its own performance. Apple executives (especially the late Steve Jobs) have not been shy about sharing Apple’s self-image as a company that makes “insanely great” products, and Apple’s advertising and public relations efforts are remarkably sophisticated and effective in reporting to the world at least some aspects of how Apple sees itself. I will probably never forget, for instance, Apple’s iconic “1984” Super Bowl commercial, which I showed to the first class I ever taught at MIT, in February 1984.
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The goal of this secretive internal training facility is to teach Apple managers the company’s proprietary way of managing, which Steve Jobs felt was quite different from what is taught in traditional MBA programs. For instance, course work at Apple University includes lessons in how Apple formulated its own retail strategy from scratch and how it took an unusual approach to commissioning factories in China.6 Given all these factors, it’s clear that in a variety of sophisticated ways, Apple is conscious in the sense of being self-aware. Goal-Directed Behavior Like any for-profit corporation, Apple needs to make a profit to survive.
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But just as you can speculate what it would be like to be other people and animals, you can at least speculate about what it might be like to be Apple. For instance, people can’t live without eating food, and if they don’t get enough, they feel hungry. Apple can’t live without making money, and if it doesn’t get enough, perhaps it feels something like hunger, too. In 1997, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple as CEO, for example, Apple had only about 90 days of cash left, and perhaps the company felt something like deep hunger pangs, perhaps even panic, at that point. But if Apple sometimes feels hunger for profits, I think it probably feels something closer to lust for creating innovative products.
pages: 280 words: 82,355 Extreme Teams: Why Pixar, Netflix, AirBnB, and Other Cutting-Edge Companies Succeed Where Most Fail by Robert Bruce Shaw, James Foster, Brilliance Audio
Airbnb, augmented reality, call centre, cloud computing, data science, deliberate practice, Elon Musk, emotional labour, financial engineering, future of work, holacracy, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Jony Ive, loose coupling, meta-analysis, nuclear winter, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh
In particular, the relationships among team members either enable results when a team “gels” or, on the other extreme, hinder results when factions within the group undermine its ability to operate at a high level. Relationships, from this point of view, are a means to an end—and are not on par with the need to deliver results. The chief designer at Apple, Jony Ives, tells a story about Steve Jobs that illustrates this point.36 Jobs believed that a key to his success was staffing his teams with highly talented people. His role as a leader was then to push them to achieve more than they thought possible. At one point, Jobs was unhappy with the product that Ives and his team were developing.
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They need their companies, as companies, to be equally innovative—workplaces that are challenging commonly accepted ways of operating. They understand that their legacies will be based not on the products they create but on their ability to build creative and agile organizations that endure over time. Steve Jobs will always be recognized for his innovative products but the true test of his leadership will be if Apple can continue to innovate and grow for the next 50 years. Does the company he created have the people, cultures, and processes needed to do so? At this point, the jury is still out. There is another motive that drives many of these leaders to create new types of organizations—a motive more personal and self-centered.
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See Hackman, Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2002), 30. 34Amanda Little, “An Interview with Patagonia Founder Yvon Chouinard,” Grist, October 23, 2004. 35Megan Hustad, “Whole Foods’ John Mackey: Self-Awareness on Aisle 5?” Fortune, March 8, 2013. 36Ian Parker, “How an Industrial Designer Became Apple’s Greatest Product,” February 23, 2015. 37Jay Yarow, “Jony Ive: This Is the Most Important Thing I Learned from Steve Jobs,” Business Insider, October 10, 2014. 38Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001). 39There is a great deal of research on the impact of social cohesion on performance.
pages: 629 words: 142,393 The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Kessler, barriers to entry, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, c2.com, call centre, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, commoditize, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, illegal immigration, index card, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, license plate recognition, loose coupling, mail merge, national security letter, old-boy network, OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, post-materialism, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert X Cringely, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game
You are not allowed to add programs to the all-in-one device that Steve Jobs sells you. Its functionality is locked in, though Apple can change it through remote updates. Indeed, to those who managed to tinker with the code to enable the iPhone to support more or different applications,4 Apple threatened (and then delivered on the threat) to transform the iPhone into an iBrick.5 The machine was not to be generative beyond the innovations that Apple (and its exclusive carrier, AT&T) wanted. Whereas the world would innovate for the Apple II, only Apple would innovate for the iPhone. (A promised software development kit may allow others to program the iPhone with Apple’s permission.)
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., ModMyiFone, Main Page, http://www.modmyifone.com/wiki/index.php/ (as of Sept. 30, 2007, 16:17 GMT) (containing code and instructions for modifications). 5. See Posting of Saul Hansell to N.Y. Times Bits Blog, Saul Hansell, Steve Jobs Girds for the Long iPhone War, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/steve-jobs-girds-for-the-long-iphone-war/ (Sept. 27, 2007, 19:01); Jane Wake-field, Apple iPhone Warning Proves True, BBC NEWS, Sept. 28, 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7017660.stm. 6. See John Markoff, Steve Jobs Walks the Tightrope Again, N.Y. TIMES, Jan. 12, 2007, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/12/technology/12apple.html. 7. Posting of Ryan Block to Engadget, A Lunchtime Chat with Bill Gates, http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/08/a-lunchtime-chat-with-bill-gates-at-ces/ (Jan. 8, 2007, 14:01).
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It was a technical and design triumph for Jobs, bringing the company into a market with an extraordinary potential for growth, and pushing the industry to a new level of competition in ways to connect us to each other and to the Web. This was not the first time Steve Jobs had launched a revolution. Thirty years earlier, at the First West Coast Computer Faire in nearly the same spot, the twenty-one-year-old Jobs, wearing his first suit, exhibited the Apple II personal computer to great buzz amidst “10,000 walking, talking computer freaks.”2 The Apple II was a machine for hobbyists who did not want to fuss with soldering irons: all the ingredients for a functioning PC were provided in a convenient molded plastic case.
Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage by Roger L. Martin
algorithmic management, asset allocation, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Frank Gehry, global supply chain, high net worth, Innovator's Dilemma, Isaac Newton, mobile money, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, six sigma, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Wall-E, winner-take-all economy
A fine example of successful CEO behavior between the two extremes is Steve Jobs, cofounder and returned CEO of Apple. Jobs has a long-standing reputation as a visionary designer. He was the cocreator of the Apple II, the forerunner of the Apple Macintosh, and after he left Apple in 1985, the company fell into a succession of disastrous strategies and fratricidal politics. Since his triumphant return as CEO in 1997, Apple has produced a string of design hits including the iMac series, the iPod, and the iPhone. Given his reputation and track record, most people would assume that Jobs functions as Apple’s analogue to Laliberté and Lazaridis, chief designer as well as the company’s leading advocate of validity.
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The master of configuration is Steve Jobs, who created an activity system for the iPod, including iTunes and Apple stores. The system made iPod a compelling product, exceedingly hard to replicate and highly profitable. (See figure 7-2.) For a manager, the configuration step is to ask how your insight and new solution fit into the larger scheme of the business in which you operate. The activity system you create may relate only to your department or project. But even within that limited sphere, you can build a model to test and verify. FIGURE 7-2 Apple’s iPod activity system Source: Apple Activity System developed and copyright by Heather Fraser and Mark Leung, 2008.
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James Hackett of Steelcase acquired the design firm IDEO to infuse design thinking across the entire Steelcase organization. 5 Between the extremes represented by Laliberté and Lazaridis at one end and Hackett and Lafley at the other, there are numerous intermediate alternatives. Steve Jobs, for instance, cofounder and returned CEO of Apple Inc., is probably the CEO most widely viewed as a design thinker, thanks to elegant, customer-pleasing products like the Macintosh, iMac, iPod, and iPhone, among many others. But he is not the solitary design genius of popular imagination. It was Apple’s designers, led by Jonathan Ive, who realized those innovative products. Jobs played a different, equally crucial role: he created an organization that placed “insanely great” design at the top of its hierarchy of values, and he gave the green light to spend the resources necessary to make lasting successes of his designers’ innovations.
pages: 472 words: 117,093 Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson
"Robert Solow", 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day
: “Ballmer Laughs at iPhone,” YouTube, September 18, 2007, 2:22, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U. 152 “When [the iPhone] first came out in early 2007”: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 501. 152 “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC”: John Markoff, “Phone Shows Apple’s Impact on Consumer Products,” New York Times, January 11, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/11/technology/11cnd-apple.html. 162 Steve Jobs made a “nine-digit” acquisition offer: Victoria Barret, “Dropbox: The Inside Story of Tech’s Hottest Startup,” Forbes, October 18, 2011, http://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2011/10/18/dropbox-the-inside-story-of-techs-hottest-startup/#3b780ed92863. 162 84% of total revenue for Facebook: Facebook, “Facebook Reports Third Quarter 2016 Results,” November 2, 2016, https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2016/Facebook-Reports-Third-Quarter-2016-Results/default.aspx. 163 “grand slam”: Apple, “iPhone App Store Downloads Top 10 Million in First Weekend,” July 14, 2008, http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/07/14iPhone-App-Store-Downloads-Top-10-Million-in-First-Weekend.html. 164 $6 billion: Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Apple’s App Store Sales Hit $20 Billion, Signs of Slower Growth Emerge,” Wall Street Journal, January 6, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-app-store-sales-hit-20-billion-signs-of-slower-growth-emerge-1452087004. 165 “Jobs soon figured out”: Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 501. 165 Facebook’s offer to publish: Henry Mance, “UK Newspapers: Rewriting the Story,” Financial Times, February 9, 2016, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/0aa8beac-c44f-11e5-808f-8231cd71622e.html#axzz3znzgrkTq. 166 “we only have the faintest idea”: Peter Rojas, “Google Buys Cellphone Software Company,” Engadget, August 17, 2005, https://www.engadget.com/2005/08/17/google-buys-cellphone-software-company. 166 “best deal ever”: Owen Thomas, “Google Exec: Android Was ‘Best Deal Ever,’ ” VentureBeat, October 27, 2010, http://venturebeat.com/2010/10/27/google-exec-android-was-best-deal-ever. 166 Android founder Andy Rubin: Victor H., “Did You Know Samsung Could Buy Android First, but Laughed It Out of Court?”
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v=eywi0h_Y5_U. 152 “When [the iPhone] first came out in early 2007”: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 501. 152 “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC”: John Markoff, “Phone Shows Apple’s Impact on Consumer Products,” New York Times, January 11, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/11/technology/11cnd-apple.html. 162 Steve Jobs made a “nine-digit” acquisition offer: Victoria Barret, “Dropbox: The Inside Story of Tech’s Hottest Startup,” Forbes, October 18, 2011, http://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2011/10/18/dropbox-the-inside-story-of-techs-hottest-startup/#3b780ed92863. 162 84% of total revenue for Facebook: Facebook, “Facebook Reports Third Quarter 2016 Results,” November 2, 2016, https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2016/Facebook-Reports-Third-Quarter-2016-Results/default.aspx. 163 “grand slam”: Apple, “iPhone App Store Downloads Top 10 Million in First Weekend,” July 14, 2008, http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/07/14iPhone-App-Store-Downloads-Top-10-Million-in-First-Weekend.html. 164 $6 billion: Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Apple’s App Store Sales Hit $20 Billion, Signs of Slower Growth Emerge,” Wall Street Journal, January 6, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-app-store-sales-hit-20-billion-signs-of-slower-growth-emerge-1452087004. 165 “Jobs soon figured out”: Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 501. 165 Facebook’s offer to publish: Henry Mance, “UK Newspapers: Rewriting the Story,” Financial Times, February 9, 2016, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/0aa8beac-c44f-11e5-808f-8231cd71622e.html#axzz3znzgrkTq. 166 “we only have the faintest idea”: Peter Rojas, “Google Buys Cellphone Software Company,” Engadget, August 17, 2005, https://www.engadget.com/2005/08/17/google-buys-cellphone-software-company. 166 “best deal ever”: Owen Thomas, “Google Exec: Android Was ‘Best Deal Ever,’ ” VentureBeat, October 27, 2010, http://venturebeat.com/2010/10/27/google-exec-android-was-best-deal-ever. 166 Android founder Andy Rubin: Victor H., “Did You Know Samsung Could Buy Android First, but Laughed It Out of Court?”
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CHAPTER 7 PAYING COMPLEMENTS, AND OTHER SMART STRATEGIES The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. — Friedrich von Hayek, 1988 IN 2007, STEVE JOBS WAS IN THE MIDDLE OF WHAT WAS PERHAPS the greatest tenure as a CEO in US corporate history. But throughout that year, his failure to fully appreciate a basic insight from economics threatened to stall his company’s momentum. How Steve Jobs Nearly Blew It Early in 2007, Apple introduced the iPhone, a product that deserves the label “iconic.” Its groundbreaking design and novel features, including multitouch screen, powerful mobile Internet browser, accelerometer, and GPS made it an instant hit, with rapturous reviews and sales of over 6 million handsets in its first year.
pages: 280 words: 71,268 Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World With OKRs by John Doerr
Albert Einstein, Big Tech, Bob Noyce, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Ray Kurzweil, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, web application, Yogi Berra, éminence grise
At the same time, he served as lead outside director on Apple’s board, which for anyone else might have presented a conflict. It drove Steve Jobs crazy, especially after Android emerged to challenge the iPhone. Steve harangued Bill forever to choose Apple and leave Google, but the Coach refused: “Steve, I’m not helping Google with their technology. I can’t even spell HTML. I’m just helping them be a better business every day.” When Steve persisted, the Coach said, “Don’t make me choose. You are not going to like the choice I’m going to make.” And Steve backed down because the Coach was his one true confidant. ( He “kept Steve Jobs going,” as Eric Schmidt told Forbes .
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Soon he was my first call whenever I backed a new entrepreneur. It became our MO: Kleiner invests, Doerr sponsors, Doerr calls Campbell, Campbell coaches the team. We ran that game plan again and again. In 1997, Steve Jobs returned to Apple in the most amazing nonhostile takeover of a public company ever, without putting up a penny. Steve asked for the resignations of all but one of Apple’s directors, and then he called Bill Campbell to join his new board. The Coach refused to be paid for this work; he was giving back to the Valley that had done so much for him. When a few companies prevailed upon him to accept stock, he funneled the proceeds into his philanthropic organization.
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Objective: Win the Indy 500. Key result: Increase average lap speed by 2 percent. Key result: Test at wind tunnel ten times. Key result: Reduce average pit stop time by one second. Key result: Reduce pit stop errors by 50 percent. Key result: Practice pit stops one hour per day. Less Is More As Steve Jobs understood, “Innovation means saying no to one thousand things.” In most cases, the ideal number of quarterly OKRs will range between three and five. It may be tempting to usher more objectives inside the velvet rope, but it’s generally a mistake. Too many objectives can blur our focus on what counts, or distract us into chasing the next shiny thing.
pages: 362 words: 83,464 The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin
2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional
.,” Bloomberg Businessweek, December 17, 2013, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-12-17/amazon-may-get-its-first-labor-union-in-the-u-dot-s. 126. Tian Luo and Amar Mann, “Survival and Growth of Silicon Valley High-tech Businesses Born in 2000,” Monthly Labor Review, September 2011, pp. 16–31. 127. Timothy Noah, “Steve Jobs, Jobs-Creator,” New Republic (blog), October 6, 2011, http://www.newrepublic.com/blog/timothy-noah/95877/steve-jobs-job-creator. 128. John Markoff, “Silicon Valley Reacts to Economy With a New Approach,” New York Times, April 21, 2001; Robert D. Hof, “Venture Capital’s Liquidators,” Bloomberg Businessweek, December 03, 2008, http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2008-12-03/venture-capitals-liquidators. 129.
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Such thinking, notes the leftist economist Thomas Piketty, has been used in the contemporary setting to “justify the extreme inequalities and to defend the privileges of the winners.”27 This self-regard has been reinforced by public perception.28 In 2011, over 72 percent of Americans had positive feelings about the computer industry, as opposed to a mere 30 percent for banking and 20 percent for oil and gas.29 Even during the Occupy protests in 2012, few criticisms were hurled by the “screwed generation” at tech titans. Indeed, when Steve Jobs, a .000001 percenter worth $7 billion and a rugged capitalist of the classic type, passed away, protestors openly mourned his demise.30 Unlike the grandees of Wall Street or the energy industry, the tech Oligarchs have so far experienced relatively little of the criticism commonly directed at Wall Street or energy executives for their huge compensation levels.
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Even more pronounced were their differences with their rivals in Europe and Asia, who were trapped by rigid corporate structures.43 What they relied on were not long established ties, notes analyst Anna Lee Saxenian, but “the social and technical networks” that provided funding and the critical pool of expertise.44 This networked system, which included a large number of specialized firms, was also markedly more supportive of younger entrepreneurs, among them the then twenty-something Steve Jobs. This helped consolidate the Valley’s supremacy over its traditional rival, the greater Boston area. By 1990, the Valley accounted for 39 of the nation’s fastest growing electronics companies, compared to just four along Boston’s Route 128. Over the ensuing decade, Valley firms, largely through the application of software, also overcame what had once been considered insurmountable competition from Japan.45 The great hope promised by this emerging, post-industrial information economy was perhaps best stated by futurist Alvin Toffler.
pages: 334 words: 104,382 Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang
23andMe, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, California gold rush, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, data science, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, gender pay gap, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, high net worth, Hyperloop, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microservices, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, pull request, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, subscription business, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, women in the workforce
As the number of overall computer science degrees picked back up leading into the dot-com boom, more men than women were filling those coveted seats. In fact, the percentage of women in the field would dramatically decline for the next two and a half decades. APPLE UPSETS THE NERD CART As women were leaving the tech world, a new type of tech hero was taking center stage. In 1976, Apple was co-founded by Steve Wozniak, your typical nerd, and Steve Jobs, who was not your typical nerd at all. Jobs exuded a style and confidence heretofore unseen in the computer industry. He had few technical skills—Wozniak handled all that—yet Jobs was a never-before-seen kind of tech rock star.
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Page’s reasons were never clearly spelled out, but insiders report that over the years Mayer had become a sharply polarizing figure whose colleagues either loved her or couldn’t stand her. Mayer often had a strict vision she would try to implement, and it often rubbed people the wrong way. Of course, being prickly and uncompromising has been a lauded attribute for male leaders in tech. “Steve Jobs had a very top-down thing going on for him, and that worked for Apple,” Laura Holmes said. “Did it work better for Apple because he was a man? I don’t know, so it’s kind of hard to say.” In June 2012, about a year after she was moved out of the inner circle, Mayer arranged a meeting with Sergey Brin. The quirky Google co-founder wheeled into her office on Rollerblades (twenty minutes late, in typical Brin fashion), and Mayer told him the news: she was leaving Google to become CEO of Yahoo.
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The first computer in my childhood home was an Apple II, and my mom, a schoolteacher with no technical background, used it with pride. Inside the industry, Jobs could have become an example of all that the tech industry could gain by bringing in a more diverse workforce. His vision and understanding of the consumer marketplace demonstrated what could be changed when different voices were added to the product development cycle. Unfortunately, the industry took the wrong lesson from Jobs’s achievement and only succeeded in creating a new stereotype, one that—once again—favored men over women. Looking at the hypercool Steve Jobs, investors noted his supreme self-confidence and fearlessness of risk and decided that those were keys to entrepreneurial achievement.
pages: 486 words: 132,784 Inventors at Work: The Minds and Motivation Behind Modern Inventions by Brett Stern
Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, Build a better mousetrap, business process, cloud computing, computer vision, cyber-physical system, distributed generation, game design, Grace Hopper, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart transportation, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the market place, Yogi Berra
Calvert: These are the things that an inventor really needs to learn and work out before taking that big step of sending a patent application to the USPTO—hopefully as the prelude to starting up their own business. 1 www.uspto.gov/inventors/independent/eye/201206/index.jsp 2 www.uiausa.org CHAPTER 23 Steve Wozniak Co-Founder Apple Computer A Silicon Valley icon and philanthropist for more than thirty years, Steve Wozniak helped shape the computing industry with his design of Apple’s first line of products, the Apple I and II, and influenced the popular Macintosh. In 1976, Wozniak and Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer Inc. with Wozniak’s Apple I personal computer. The following year he introduced his Apple II personal computer, featuring a central processing unit, a keyboard, color graphics, and a floppy disk drive. The Apple II was integral to launching the personal computer industry.
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He spent a lot of his own time to make his class great. He contacted companies and found engineers who would let students like myself go in and work on projects such as programming a computer to control streetlights. When Steve Jobs and I were first starting Apple, we went to the world’s first computer trade show out in Atlantic City, called PC ’76. We were just introducing the Apple I, even though we had the Apple II designed and working. There were a bunch of little companies with two young kids like us—with no money and ideas that maybe these microprocessors could make the start of a business. It was the garage-style entrepreneurship that you see nowadays with kids going into writing apps for iPhones and the like.
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Another mentor whom I didn’t meet until I was just about to launch Keen in 2002 was Steve Jobs. When I was flying through San Francisco airport, I was sitting there working on my Mac and a guy comes up to me and he’s like, “Hey, what do you use your Mac for?” And I say that I am putting together a footwear company and I’m laying out the catalog, and he’s like, “Oh, here’s the latest operating system.” You know, it wasn’t even out yet. And I’m like, “Oh, you must work for Apple.” And he said, “Yeah, yeah.” Stern: He handed you a CD with the OS. Keen: Yeah. And he said, “I’m the head of marketing at Apple.” I said, “Oh, do you know Steve? I’d been a Mac user since 1986.”
pages: 245 words: 83,272 Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard
1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce
Digital Journalism 3, no. 3 (November 7, 2014) 398–415. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2014.976411. Donn, Jeff. “Eric Trump Foundation Flouts Charity Standards.” AP News, December 23, 2016. https://apnews.com/760b4159000b4a1cb1901cb038021cea. Dormehl, Luke. “Why John Sculley Doesn’t Wear an Apple Watch (and Regrets Booting Steve Jobs).” Cult of Mac, February 19, 2016. https://www.cultofmac.com/413044/john-sculley-apple-watch-steve-jobs/. Dougherty, Conor. “Google Photos Mistakenly Labels Black People ‘Gorillas.’” New York Times, July 1, 2015. https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/01/google-photos-mistakenly-labels-black-people-gorillas/. Dreyfus, Hubert L.
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And these eminent scientists worked on the dumbwaiter to outer space for an entire six months. Everybody in tech knew Minsky, and everyone relied on him. Steve Jobs famously got the idea for a computer with a mouse and a GUI from Alan Kay and his team at Xerox PARC. When Jobs left Apple in 1985 and John Sculley took over, Kay told Sculley they needed to go out and find sources of new technology. They weren’t going to be able to turn to PARC for Apple’s next big move, Kay said. “That led to us spending a lot of time on the East Coast, at the Media Lab in MIT, where we worked with people like Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert,” Sculley said in a 2016 interview.7 “A lot of that technology we ended up putting into a concept video Alan and I produced, called ‘Knowledge Navigator.’
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Vincent, “Twitter Taught Microsoft’s AI Chatbot to Be a Racist Asshole in Less than a Day.” 4. Plautz, “Hitchhiking Robot Decapitated in Philadelphia.” 5. Unless otherwise indicated, quotes from Minsky in this section are taken from Minsky, “Web of Stories Interview.” 6. Brand, The Media Lab; Levy, Hackers. 7. Dormehl, “Why John Sculley Doesn’t Wear an Apple Watch (and Regrets Booting Steve Jobs).” 8. Lewis, “Rise of the Fembots”; LaFrance, “Why Do So Many Digital Assistants Have Feminine Names?” 9. Hillis, “Radioactive Skeleton in Marvin Minsky’s Closet.” 10. Alba, “Chicago Uber Driver Charged with Sexual Abuse of Passenger”; Fowler, “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber”; Isaac, “How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide.” 11.
pages: 382 words: 105,819 Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee
4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Filter Bubble, game design, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War
I had successful surgery in early July 2001, but my recovery was very slow. It took me nearly a year to recover fully. During that time, Apple shipped the first iPod. I thought it was a sign of good things to come and reached out to Steve Jobs to see if he would be interested in recapitalizing Apple. At the time, Apple’s share price was about twelve dollars per share, which, thanks to stock splits, is equivalent to a bit more than one dollar per share today. The company had more than twelve dollars in cash per share, which meant investors were attributing zero value to Apple’s business. Most of the management options had been issued at forty dollars per share, so they were effectively worthless.
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Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal, by Nick Bilton (New York, Portfolio, 2013), is worth reading because of Twitter’s outsized influence on journalists, an influence out of proportion with the skills of Twitter’s leadership. No study of Silicon Valley would be complete without a focus on Steve Jobs. Walter Isaacson’s biography Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011) was a bestseller. I was lucky enough to know Steve Jobs. We were not close, but I knew Steve for a long time and had several opportunities to work with him. I experienced the best and the worst. Above all, I respect beyond measure all the amazing products created on Steve’s watch. This bibliographic essay includes only the books that helped me prepare to write Zucked.
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It is part of a larger philosophical approach, human-driven technology, which advocates returning technology to the role of being a tool to serve user needs rather than one that exploits users and makes them less capable. With its focus on user interface issues, humane design is a subset of human-driven technology, which also incorporates things like privacy, data security, and applications functionality. We used to take human-driven technology for granted. It was the philosophical foundation for Steve Jobs’s description of computers as a “bicycle for the mind,” a tool that creates value through exercise as well as fun. Jobs thought computers should make humans more capable, not displace or exploit them. Every successful tech product used to fit the Jobs model, and many still do. Personal computers still empower the workers who use them.
pages: 519 words: 142,646 Track Changes by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
active measures, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, David Brooks, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, forensic accounting, future of work, Future Shock, Google Earth, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, HyperCard, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, mail merge, Marshall McLuhan, Mother of all demos, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, pattern recognition, pink-collar, popular electronics, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, text mining, thinkpad, Turing complete, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, Year of Magical Thinking
However that plainly joyous note, composed after an apparently sleepless night spent exploring the system, testifies to just how powerful such a prospect must have seemed. The Altos remained in use at Xerox PARC throughout the 1970s. Steve Jobs’s famous pilgrimage to PARC wasn’t to come until December 1979. It would be another half decade before the Alto’s most important design features, including the bitmapped display, windows, and the mouse, were brought to market as Apple’s first Macintosh computer in early 1984. (Xerox did attempt to introduce a graphical computer system incorporating some of Alto’s capabilities in 1981; called the Xerox Star, it was marketed to businesses rather than to personal users, was expensive, and had to compete with dedicated word processing systems; thus it was never a commercial success.)
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Hiltzik, Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (New York: Harper, 1999). 16. This episode (and Apple’s subsequent development of the technologies) is recounted in detail in Steven Levy, Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything (New York: Penguin, 1994), 77–103. For video of Tesler describing the demo in 2011, see Philip Elmer-DeWitt, Fortune, August 24, 2014, embedded YouTube video, http://fortune.com/2014/08/24/raw-footage-larry-tesler-on-steve-jobs-visit-to-xerox-parc/. 17. Michael Shrayer was an Altair owner for whom the blinking LEDs were simply not satisfactory—he quickly managed to make the computer the centerpiece of his own TV Typewriter unit, and a year later released what is generally regarded as the first word processing program for a microcomputer, Electric Pencil.
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One project of exceptional promise in this regard (researched and written contemporaneously with Track Changes) is Tom Mullaney’s forthcoming The Chinese Typewriter: A Global History; see also Nanette Gottlieb, Word-Processing Technology in Japan: Kanji and the Keyboard (London: Routledge, 2000). 10. Please see the Author’s Note regarding trackchangesbook.info, a website I have set up in anticipation of such instances. 11. As recounted in Mona Simpson, “A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs,” New York Times, October 30, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/opinion/mona-simpsons-eulogy-for-steve-jobs.html. She writes: “I didn’t know much about computers. I still worked on a manual Olivetti typewriter. I told Steve I’d recently considered my first purchase of a computer: something called the Cromemco. Steve told me it was a good thing I’d waited.
pages: 83 words: 7,274 Buyology by Martin Lindstrom
anti-work, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Pepto Bismol, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Virgin Galactic
In fact, as the results of our brain-scan study would show, the most successful products are the ones that have the most in common with religion. Take Apple, for example, one of the most popular—and profitable—brands around. I’ll never forget the Apple Macromedia conference I attended in the mid-nineties. Sitting in a packed convention center in San Francisco among ten thousand cheering fans, I was surprised when Steve Jobs, the founder and CEO, ambled out onstage, wearing his usual monkish turtleneck, and announced that Apple was going to discontinue its Newton brand of handheld computers. Jobs then dramatically hurled a Newton into a garbage can a few feet away to punctuate his decision.
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Well, we’re about to take a look at one of the most fascinating brain discoveries of recent times, one that plays an enormous role in why we’re attracted to the things we are. The place: Parma, Italy. The unwitting codiscoverers of this phenomenon? A species of monkey known as the macaque. 3 I’LL HAVE WHAT SHE’S HAVING Mirror Neurons at Work IN 2004, STEVE JOBS, CEO, chairman, and co-founder of Apple, was strolling along Madison Avenue in New York City when he noticed something strange, and gratifying. Hip white earphones (remember, back then most earphones came in basic boring black). Looping and snaking out of people’s ears, dangling down across their chests, peeking out of pockets and purses and backpacks.
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“It involves interior exploration, quests for a transcendent goal, overcoming barriers and 08/08/2009 10:45 43 of 83 file:///D:/000004/Buy__ology.html physical or spiritual healing.”3 Go Steelers. Most religions also have a clear vision. By that I mean that they are unambiguous in their mission, whether it’s to reach a certain state of grace or achieve a spiritual goal. And of course, most companies have unambiguous missions as well. Steve Jobs’s vision for Apple dates back to the mid-1980s when he said, “Man is the creator of change in this world. As such he should be above systems and structures, and not subordinate to them.” Twenty years and a few million iPods later, the company still pursues this vision, and will doubtlessly continue to do so twenty years from now.
pages: 538 words: 147,612 All the Money in the World by Peter W. Bernstein
Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency peg, David Brooks, Donald Trump, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, George Gilder, high net worth, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Maui Hawaii, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Norman Mailer, PageRank, Peter Singer: altruism, pez dispenser, popular electronics, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, school vouchers, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech baron, tech billionaire, Teledyne, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning, wealth creators, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce
In his 1989 book The Alexander Complex: The Dreams That Drive the Great Businessmen, Michael Meyer examined the lives of six empire builders, including five Forbes 400 members—Steve Jobs, Ross Perot, biotech billionaire Robert Swanson, Ted Turner, and the late shipping magnate Daniel Ludwig—to try to divine what drove them to spectacular success. They “live in the grip of a vision38,” concludes Meyer. “Work and career take on the quality of a mission, a pursuit of some Holy Grail. And because they are talented and convinced they can change the world, they often do.” Meyer refers to Apple founder39 Steve Jobs, for one, as a “visionary monster,” and other accounts seem to bear that out. In The Silicon Boys, for example, David Kaplan recounts a telling anecdote about Jobs.
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Certainly no one that morning, not even Gates, realized the full implications of what was at stake: that his deal with IBM would not only reshape the computer industry and have an impact on billions of consumers around the world, but would help bring about a seismic shift in the accumulation of wealth in America. The high-tech landscape was changing fast in 1980. Apple Computer, a three-year-old start-up2 founded by a couple of hippies from northern California, Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, was in the process of racking up $139 million in sales. Later that year, Apple would go public with the most successful stock offering since that of the Ford Motor Company in 1956. An impatient IBM3 wanted to break into the burgeoning personal-computer market, and it was going into overdrive to take advantage of a new sixteen-bit microprocessor chip developed by Intel, a company founded by Gordon E.
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., a Web holding company $1.60 (’03) One of the highest compensated CEOs in the U.S. with a $457 million pay package in 2005 and $232 million in 2006 Charles Dolan39 Cablevision Systems $3.20 (’00) Declared a special dividend in 2006, netting $580 million. In 2007, took his company private Stanley Hubbard Satellite TV $1.80 (’96) Pioneered first satellite TV in 1993 Steve Jobs Apple Computer; animated movies $4.90 (’06) The man behind Apple, the Mac, iPod, iPhone, Pixar. Highest paid CEO in U.S. in 2006 with $647 million pay package John Malone40 Cable TV $3.40 (’99) Monster cable TV deal maker now pushing satellite TV Craig McCaw41 McCaw Cellular $7.70(’00) Cellular pioneer trying for a comeback with wireless access after 2000 telecom wipeout Rupert Murdoch42 Media/Internet $11.00 (’00) “I just want to live forever—I enjoy myself too much.”
pages: 254 words: 76,064 Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe
3D printing, Albert Michelson, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler
.: Island Press, 2012), 3. 38 Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/learner/medium. 39 The Media Lab’s website includes a comprehensive overview of the Lab’s funding model, current research, and history. http://media.mit.edu/about/about-the-lab. 40 Olivia Vanni. “An Ex-Apple CEO on MIT, Marketing & Why We Can’t Stop Talking About Steve Jobs,” BostInno.com. April 8, 2016. http://bostinno.streetwise.co/2016/04/08/apples-steve-jobs-and-john-sculley-fight-over-ceo/. 41 To select just a few biologically inspired projects at the Media Lab as of May 2016, Kevin Esvelt’s Sculpting Evolution group is studying gene drives and ecological engineering; Neri Oxman’s Mediated Matter group is experimenting with microfluidics and 3D-printing living materials; and Hiroshi Ishii’s Tangible Media group has created a fabric with “living nanoactuators” that use bacteria to open or close vents in the material in response to the wearer’s body temperature. 42 Malcolm Gladwell.
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.: Krause Publications, 2007), 155. 22 Henry Ford, My Life and Work (New York: Doubleday, 1922), 73. 23 David Gartman, “Tough Guys and Pretty Boys: The Cultural Antagonisms of Engineering and Aesthetics in Automotive History,” Automobile in American Life and Society, accessed June 7, 2016, http://www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/Design/Gartman/D_Casestudy/D_Casestudy3.htm. 24 Elizabeth B-N Sanders, “From User-Centered to Participatory Design Approaches,” Design and the Social Sciences: Making Connections, 2002, 1–8. 25 Quoted in Drew Hansen, “Myth Busted: Steve Jobs Did Listen to Customers,” Forbes, December 19, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/drewhansen/2013/12/19/myth-busted-steve-jobs-did-listen-to-customers/. 26 Sanders, “From User-Centered to Participatory Design Approaches.” Conclusion 1 And the less said about the “blood-vomiting game” of 1835 the better. 2 Sensei’s Library, “Excellent Move,” last edited May 31, 2016, http://senseis.xmp.net/?
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The culture isn’t so much interdisciplinary as it is proudly “antidisciplinary”; the faculty and students more often than not aren’t just collaborating between disciplines, but are exploring the spaces between and beyond them as well. It is an approach that began with Lab cofounder Nicholas Negroponte. The Media Lab emerged from the Architecture Machine Group that Negroponte cofounded, in which architects at MIT used advanced graphical computers to experiment with computer-aided design and Negroponte (along with Steve Jobs, out in Silicon Valley) envisioned an age when computers would become personal devices. Negroponte also predicted a massive convergence that would jumble all of the disciplines together and connect arts and sciences together as well—the Media Lab’s academic program is called “Media Arts and Sciences.”
pages: 270 words: 79,068 The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz
Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, business intelligence, cloud computing, financial independence, Google Glasses, hiring and firing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kiva Systems, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, new economy, nuclear winter, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, six sigma, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Strategic Defense Initiative
He began his career as a college football coach and did not enter the business world until he was forty. Despite the late start, Bill eventually became the chairman and CEO of Intuit. Following that, he became a legend in high tech, mentoring great CEOs such as Steve Jobs of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Eric Schmidt of Google. Bill is extremely smart, super-charismatic, and elite operationally, but the key to his success goes beyond those attributes. In any situation—whether it’s the board of Apple, where he’s served for over a decade; the Columbia University Board of Trustees, where he is chairman; or the girls’ football team that he coaches—Bill is inevitably everybody’s favorite person.
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One could easily argue that I failed as a peacetime CEO but succeeded as a wartime one. John Chambers had a great run as peacetime CEO of Cisco but has struggled as Cisco has moved into war with Juniper, HP, and a range of new competitors. Steve Jobs, who employed a classical wartime management style, removed himself as CEO of Apple in the 1980s during their longest period of peace before coming back to Apple for a spectacular run more than a decade later, during their most intense war period. I believe that the answer is yes, but it’s hard. Mastering both wartime and peacetime skill sets means understanding the many rules of management and knowing when to follow them and when to violate them.
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I believe Jobs’s greatest achievement as a visionary leader was in getting so many super-talented people to continue following him at NeXT, long after the company lost its patina, and in getting the employees of Apple to buy into his vision when the company was weeks away from bankruptcy. It’s difficult to imagine any other leader being so compelling that he could accomplish these goals back-to-back, and this is why we call this one the Steve Jobs attribute. THE RIGHT KIND OF AMBITION: THE BILL CAMPBELL ATTRIBUTE One of the biggest misperceptions in our society is that a prerequisite for becoming a CEO is to be selfish, ruthless, and callous.
pages: 282 words: 81,873 Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein
23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, Extropian, fail fast, gamification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, passive income, patent troll, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator
He was about to move to London to take a job with a startup that projected Web streams on walls at tech conferences. It sounded stupid, but I congratulated him all the same. This was his dream vacation in America—his “techie pilgrimage” around Silicon Valley. So far Francis had visited Steve Jobs’s old house; the garage where Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak built the first Apple computer; the Xerox PARC laboratory, where many modern features of consumer computers, such as the graphical user interface, had been invented with government support; the Hewlett-Packard campus; and the Googleplex, which was a stone’s throw from Jeannie’s place.
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“Part of the seduction is, if you just keep your head down and don’t cause any trouble, there’s some half-million-a-year, giant-paying job waiting for you,” Gregg says. “Look at Michael Moritz. He was a Silicon Valley reporter. Now he’s one of the richest people in the world.” Moritz came up at the same time as Gregg and wrote an important early eighties profile of Steve Jobs for Time magazine—and subsequently the first book about Apple’s history, titled The Little Kingdom. Moritz parlayed the connections he made as a journalist to a partnership at Sequoia Capital, which in turn landed him a seat on the board of Google and eventually a personal net worth of more than $3 billion. Since Gregg left the business in 2002, a new problem had emerged.
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It cost $70 to be listed alongside these fine companies, inclusive of a custom-made pitch video. I passed. The Lifograph website also featured a number of blog posts, almost half of which were about Steve Jobs. One post was authored by Manny Fernandez, a small-time investor whom I would be pitching at the San Jose event. Manny did not waste his readers’ time by padding his Jobsian advice with an introductory paragraph. Instead, he plunged straight into a numbered list of tautologies. 1. BE A LEADER Steve Jobs was a college dropout, but he was a leader. He was able to rally up investors and employees to create an amazing product. Leadership is something you develop over time.
Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World by Matt Alt
4chan, augmented reality, blue-collar work, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, financial engineering, game design, glass ceiling, global pandemic, haute cuisine, hive mind, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, period drama, Ponzi scheme, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, three-martini lunch, union organizing, zero-sum game
Tsuji’s Tokyo home in the late seventies: Ibid., 87. 5: PLUGGING IN AND DROPPING OUT “The Sony Walkman has done more”: William Gibson, Time Out, October 6, 1993, 49. Steve Jobs was on his worst behavior: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 146. Jobs was, to put it mildly, a Sony fanboy: Alan Deutschman, The Second Coming of Steve Jobs (New York: Broadway Books, 2000), 29. He took it apart piece by piece: George Beahm, Steve Jobs’s Life by Design: Lessons to Be Learned from His Last Lecture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014), 29. “He didn’t want to be IBM”: Ibid., 29
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The portable transistor radio transformed music culture by freeing young listeners from the shackles of parental approval, letting them mainline rock and roll in the privacy of their own rooms. “It opened my world up,” says the engineer Steve Wozniak, who went on to play the role of Ibuka to Steve Jobs’s Morita at Apple Computer. “I could sleep with it and hear music all night long.” They listened to newfangled forms of music with titles that mystified the grown-ups, like 1954’s “Rock Around the Clock”—the first song with “rock” in its title. Through their musical choices over the years to come, young Americans would construct the soundtrack for an ideological rebellion, most obviously in the form of the protest rock that sustained student activists of the sixties.
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His personal tastes might have been a little peculiar, but in wanting to escape into his own private world, he was far from alone. 5 PLUGGING IN AND DROPPING OUT The Walkman 1979 The Sony Walkman has done more to change human perception than any virtual reality gadget. —WILLIAM GIBSON STEVE JOBS WAS on his worst behavior as he toured the factories of Japan in 1983. He desperately needed a supplier of 3.5-inch floppy-disk drives for his newest creation, a revolutionary personal computer system he called the Macintosh. Yet he wore jeans and sneakers to meetings with formally dressed CEOs and their salaryman underlings.
pages: 302 words: 74,350 I Hate the Internet: A Novel by Jarett Kobek
Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, Burning Man, disruptive innovation, do what you love, East Village, Edward Snowden, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, immigration reform, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, liberation theology, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, packet switching, PageRank, Peter Thiel, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, V2 rocket, Vernor Vinge, wage slave, Whole Earth Catalog
The reason why people harass teenagers into suicide is because a bunch of White dudes with no sense of the human experience decided that they would build anonymity into the Internet as a feature rather than a bug! You nerds have blood on your hands! “Fuck Steve Jobs and fuck your worship of Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was no more than nothing! His only distinction was that, unlike every other awful CEO in tech, he had a mild sense of design. His jeans were rubbish! His turtle necks were awful! He owed seven percent of Disney! Apple was a company run by a bully surrounded by cultists so indoctrinated that they didn’t realize they were being bullied. In the end, all the sycophancy killed their god!
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No one knew much about her, which reminded Christine of the Eleusinian Mysteries, shrouded in darkness. And there was good ol’ Steve Jobs, better known as Hades. And not just because he was dead and rotting in the dank recesses of the netherworld, doomed for an uncertain term to watch projected images of impoverished factories workers on the rocky walls of oblivion. Basically, Steve Jobs was Hades because Hades was a total unyielding dick. The defining aspect of Steve Jobs was the marriage of his innate dickishness with gauzy Bay Area entitlement. This blessed union birthed a blanket of darkness which settled over the Western world. Steve Jobs grew up reading The Whole Earth Catalog, a publication dedicated to the proposition that by spending your money in the right way, you could become the right kind of person.
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But because The Whole Earth Catalog emerged from the Bay Area after the death of several utopian ideals, the stench of its message was masked by patchouli, incense and paperback editions of gruel-thin Eastern spirituality. It was a new kind of marketing, geared towards the insecure bourgeois aspirant. Steve Jobs sucked it in and shit it out and transformed himself into Hades. The one god that can’t be escaped. His promise was simple: you have a choice. You can die ugly and unloved, or you can buy an overpriced computer or iPod and listen to early Bob Dylan and spin yourself off the wheel of Samsara. Your fundamental uncreativity will be masked by group membership.
pages: 260 words: 67,823 Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever by Alex Kantrowitz
accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, anti-bias training, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer vision, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, Firefox, fulfillment center, Google Chrome, hive mind, income inequality, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Jony Ive, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, new economy, Peter Thiel, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, zero-sum game
an iPhone 5c: Ng, Alfred. “FBI Asked Apple to Unlock iPhone Before Trying All Its Options.” CNET, March 27, 2018. https://www.cnet.com/news/fbi-asked-apple-to-unlock-iphone-before-trying-all-its-options. not just one iPhone: Grossman, Lev. “Apple CEO Tim Cook: Inside His Fight with the FBI.” Time. Time Magazine, March 17, 2016. https://time.com/4262480/tim-cook-apple-fbi-2. the side of privacy: Cook, Tim. “Customer Letter.” Apple. Accessed February 16, 2016. https://www.apple.com/customer-letter. “To me, marketing is about values”: “Best Marketing Strategy Ever! Steve Jobs Think Different / Crazy Ones Speech (with Real Subtitles).”
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These improvements have helped the iPhone maintain its position at the top of the phone market. And even if people buy the iPhone less frequently, we both agreed, Apple will be fine. “As a user, I’m kind of happy with where things are with Apple right now,” Wozniak said. “What if their sales and market share dropped in half? So what. They’re still a huge company; it’s not going to go away.” But Apple isn’t interested in coasting on the iPhone’s success. It wants to build a car. It wants HomePod and Siri to succeed. It has bigger plans for the Steve Jobs Theater than showing trailers for shows on Apple TV+, a service meant to make more money from iPhone users (“Because they’re in a billion pockets, y’all,” as Oprah put it).
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Hands on the Wheel Imagine, if you will, a beaming Tim Cook taking the stage at Apple’s Steve Jobs Theater for the company’s biggest announcement since the iPhone. The theater, a subterranean auditorium on the outskirts of Apple’s Cupertino campus, was built for big announcements. And Cook, looking out at the one thousand assembled press, partners, and employees, has brought the goods. Turning toward the audience, Cook starts off with a nod to the past. “Any company would be fortunate to have one revolutionary product. But here at Apple, we’ve been lucky enough to build three,” he might say. “The Macintosh, the iPod, and the iPhone have all changed lives in profound ways.
pages: 468 words: 124,573 How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the Secrets of the Most Successful Entrepreneurs of Our Time by George Berkowski
Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business intelligence, call centre, crowdsourcing, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, game design, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, Paul Graham, QR code, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, ubercab, Y Combinator
I’ll go through a brief history of how apps came about, and then explore three core reasons that allow apps to deliver a great mobile experience – things you’ll need to keep in mind when developing your own billion-dollar app. A brief history of the app The term ‘app’ has been around for a long time. An app (or application) and a software program are the same thing. Thanks to Apple, though, the word has been adopted by the mobile world, and means either a smartphone app or a tablet app. This wonderful app ecosystem almost didn’t happen at all, according to Walter Isaacson, the biographer of the famed Steve Jobs. When Apple was developing the iPhone, Jobs was initially not too enamoured with the idea that third-party developers should be able to create software to run directly on his beautiful, sleek device – and potentially mess it up.
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Chapter 36 Unicorns do Exist Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you, and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Steve Jobs uttered these poignant words in 1995 during an interview with the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association. Jobs’s personal journey was particularly trying. At the time, Apple was in turmoil, and Jobs would only return to Apple a year later in 1996. What Jobs says next in the interview is particularly powerful: … shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just going to live in it versus make your mark upon it.
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Whether you’re a newcomer to mobile technology, a gifted developer, seasoned entrepreneur or just intrigued by what it takes to build a billion-dollar company in this day and age, this book is for you. It’s not just a theory My bookshelves are piled high with books brimming with great advice about how to build a great business, about how to cross chasms and be an effective executive. Biographies of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, investor Warren Buffett, Google cofounder Larry Page, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and businesswoman and Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg peer down over my desk. But, as I reread these books, I keep finding business strategies that no longer work, or principles that, although only a few years old, seem to be already outdated in the fast-moving world of mobile technology.
pages: 480 words: 123,979 Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier
4chan, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, impulse control, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons
The way the Valley really worked was that a tiny number of unofficial, supersocial, superpowered women connected everyone, creating companies, even whole technological movements. Histories of Silicon Valley always mention captains of industry like Steve Jobs, as they should, but you never see the names of the women who probably did as much to design the place. Linda Stone, aka GNF of the North in the Little Hunan, later became a well-known executive at both Apple and Microsoft at different times, but she also had an outsized and intangible early influence on the evolution of Silicon Valley. A list of accomplishments doesn’t really capture her role. Linda got Apple into making “content,” in those days still distributed on compact disks (remember CD-ROMs?)
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VR starts to feel good when certain perceived latencies get down to around 7 or 8 milliseconds. 7. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/virtually-there/ 8. A second generation came out that produced much smoother and finer data. 9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho8KVOe_y08 Chapter 14 1. Apple famously fired Steve Jobs, and the whole Mac team quit. Then Apple almost died until he came back, and then it became the world’s most valuable company. This is why people like Mark Zuckerberg are shown such deference today. 2. Patricof was one of the people who didn’t do well, ultimately, from VPL. I feel bad about it. What I hear is that he never invested in VR again. 3.
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What if Silicon Valley, the place I might have the best shot at earning a living, turned out to be a place that pulled me away from the female world, from any hope of catching hold of a trace of who my mother had been? Flustered, I managed to say, “Are all the suits so bad? I have a friend who works for Steve Jobs at Apple and seems to think he has good ideas.” “Oh yeah, I worked with Steve at Atari, where he tried to be an engineer. The guy used to brag about how he’d optimize this chip, but I never saw him get anywhere. At least he learned his place.” What a curious society. Status was attached to technical attainment more than to money.
pages: 460 words: 130,820 The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown, Maureen Farrell
"side hustle", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, financial engineering, future of work, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, index fund, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-oil, railway mania, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Jobs, super pumped, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zipcar
Amazon was booming, having been led since its inception by Jeff Bezos, who had transformed the company from the plucky bookselling firm started in his garage to the world’s dominant e-commerce company. Mark Zuckerberg stayed firmly in control of Facebook, by far the most successful new tech company started in the twenty-first century. Then there was Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs, who had a cultlike following in the Valley and was in the midst of making Apple the country’s most valuable corporation. What these startups-turned-juggernauts had in common was not lost on venture capitalists: driven founders with a gift for salesmanship. It didn’t take long for a handful of influential new venture capital firms—Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz—to begin openly marketing themselves as “founder-friendly.”
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Financial startups vying to be the next generation of Wall Street giants were determined to democratize investing and expand opportunity to the underserved. The bombast was in part an outgrowth of Silicon Valley’s hippie roots, after the utopian ideals of the 1960s influenced some early leaders like Steve Jobs. But in a highly competitive market, that jargon was also necessary to lure talent. Skilled software engineers and managers had an abundance of tech companies to choose from; some could expect offers of $300,000 a year from the Googles and Apples of the world. To land top recruits, companies needed to offer more than just a salary. It was a shift from many other corners of the business world. Wall Street traders tend not to preach how they chose Goldman Sachs over UBS because one bank is better at expanding access to credit for the disadvantaged; they often do, however, say one offered better compensation.
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In 2006, Son’s rehabilitated SoftBank expanded into the mobile industry, spending roughly $15 billion to buy Vodafone’s business in Japan—a distant third-place carrier. By negotiating directly with Steve Jobs, he landed exclusive distribution rights for the iPhone, quickly vaulting his mobile phone company into the top tier. By 2012, the itch had returned. Son yearned to become a force in the United States again. He turned back to his mobile phone playbook and started trying to buy both Sprint and T-Mobile—a move to compete against AT&T and Verizon. He announced a $21.6 billion deal in late 2012 for 70 percent of Sprint. Apple’s Tim Cook and others assured him that a deal to buy T-Mobile as well would pass muster with U.S. regulators, he told others.
pages: 239 words: 56,531 The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld
Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Ted Nelson, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight
Selling to the masses is what Hustlers were born to do. The Hustlers: Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? —Bill Gates, 1976 Real artists ship. —Steve Jobs, 1983 162 HOW THE COMPUTER BECAME OUR CULTURE MACHINE If J.C.R. Licklider and Douglas Engelbart are obscure talismans even among the best-informed computer users, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are iconic, triumphal nerds.20 Jobs at his height was perhaps the most intriguing businessperson in the world, and one of the few people to have built multibillion-dollar companies in two different industries, with Apple computers and Pixar animated films.
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Gates has been admired for his strategy and condemned for his ruthlessness, but much like the Plutocrats before him, he was never defined by vision. Steve Jobs, the cofounder and CEO of Apple, on the other hand, has been known to create a “reality distortion effect” around himself because of the intensity of his vision for computing. He worked for early electronic games pioneer Atari in the late 1970s and visited Xerox PARC, where he saw the work infused with Engelbart and Kay’s Aquarian vision. This spirit resonated with Jobs, who at one point had taken a personal pilgrimage to India and lived in an ashram. But even more so, the meme of participation entered his head on those visits to PARC. The Apple II, released in 1977, was unique in having a graphics capability and a soundboard built in.
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In reaction to the buttoned-down, all-business attitudes of the Plutocrats, the Aquarians of the 1960s and 1970s—people like Douglas Englebart and Alan Kay—expand on the more openended ideas of the Patriarchs, and develop the paradigm of visual, personalized, networked computing. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Hustlers—Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs—commodify this personalized vision, putting a distinctive, “new economy” stamp on computing. Building on the installed base of all these users as the new millennium looms, the Hosts— World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and open-source guru Linus Torvalds—link these disparate personal machines into a huge web, concentrating on communication as much as technology, pushing participation to the next level.
pages: 602 words: 177,874 Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman
3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game
The idea was to try to create a device that combined the Palm Pilot—at that time basically a combination calendar, Filofax, address book, and day planner, with note-taking capabilities and a wireless Web-based text browser—with a 3G cell phone. That way when you called up a phone number in the Palm Pilot address book, you could just click on it and the cell phone would dial it. And with the same device you could surf the Internet. Jacobs approached Apple to see if they were interested in partnering with Qualcomm on this, using the Apple Newton, their Palm competitor. But Apple—this was just before Steve Jobs came back—turned them down and eventually killed the Newton. So Jacobs went to Palm and together they ended up making the first “smartphone”—the Qualcomm pdQ 1900—in 1998. It was the first phone designed not just to relay text messages, but to combine digital wireless mobile broadband connectivity to the Internet with a touchscreen and an open operating system that eventually ran downloadable apps.
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The early device they created was rather clunky: it had none of the easy user interfaces and beautiful design that Steve Jobs’s Apple iPhone would eventually offer in 2007, and it came out before there was the Internet bandwidth to do many things. So Qualcomm went back to concentrating on making everything inside the smartphone. Qualcomm gets its improvements by using software and hardware techniques to more densely pack and compress bits, and Jacobs believes it can improve further—maybe another thousandfold—before it reaches its limit. Most people think that they can watch Game of Thrones on their cell phone because Apple came out with a better phone. No, Apple gave you a larger screen and better display, but the reason it is not buffering is because Qualcomm and AT&T and others invested billions of dollars in making the wireless network and phones more efficient.
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AT&T’s reputation was on the line—and Jobs would not have been a happy camper if his beautiful phone kept dropping calls. To handle the problem, Stephenson turned to his chief of strategy, John Donovan, and Donovan enlisted Krish Prabhu, now president of AT&T Labs. Donovan picks up the story: “It’s 2006, and Apple is negotiating the service contracts for the iPhone. No one had even seen one. We decided to bet on Steve Jobs. When the phone first came out [in 2007] it had only Apple apps, and it was on a 2G network. So it had a very small straw, but it worked because people only wanted to do a few apps that came with the phone.” But then Jobs decided to open up the iPhone, as the venture capitalist John Doerr had suggested, to app developers everywhere.
pages: 515 words: 132,295 Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar
accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, gig economy, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Bogle, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, technology bubble, The Chicago School, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game
It wasn’t the way Steve Jobs would have done it. In the spring of 2013, Jobs’s successor as CEO of Apple Inc., Tim Cook, decided the company needed to borrow $17 billion. Yes, borrow. Never mind that Apple was the world’s most valuable corporation, that it had sold more than a billion devices so far, and that it already had $145 billion sitting in the bank, with another $3 billion in profits flowing in every month. So, why borrow? It was not because the company was a little short, obviously, or because it couldn’t put its hands on any of its cash. The reason, rather, was that Apple’s financial masters had determined borrowing was the better, more cost-effective way to obtain the funds.
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Icahn says he doesn’t consider his buyback push and the subsequent payouts an indictment of Cook, who has been at Apple’s helm since Steve Jobs died in 2011. “Tim Cook is doing a good job with the business,” Icahn told me back in 2013. “I think he’s good at running the business whether he does what I want or not. I’m not against the management of this company….They’ve just got too much money on their balance sheet,” he said. “But Apple is not a bank.” It’s a statement that has more truth and resonance than even Icahn, the original wolf of Wall Street, might imagine. True, Apple isn’t a bank—at least not in name. But in many ways, it acts just like one.
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There are thousands of examples that one could cite, but here’s a particularly telling one: Less than a year after Apple introduced the iPod, the company’s stock began to fall steadily.33 That was because the product that would kick-start the greatest corporate turnaround in history initially disappointed, selling under 400,000 units in its debut year. Thankfully, Steve Jobs didn’t give a fig. He stuck with the idea, and today more than 1.9 billion Apple devices have been sold. Whether Tim Cook’s Apple will be remembered in the same way is still an open question, since despite the enormous dividends, Cook’s strategy has been very much of the downsize-and-distribute kind, in which profits are handed out to investors to allay concerns over the company’s lagging stock price.
pages: 291 words: 80,068 Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Francis de Véricourt
Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, autonomous vehicles, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, circular economy, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, defund the police, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fiat currency, framing effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, game design, George Floyd, George Gilder, global pandemic, global village, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, knowledge economy, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microaggression, nudge unit, packet switching, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen
The information was also compiled from conversations with Podolny when he was at Yale, interviews, firsthand experience, and written accounts, including: Jessica Guynn, “Steve Jobs’ Virtual DNA to Be Fostered in Apple University,” Los Angeles Times, October 6, 2011, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2011-oct-06-la-fi-apple-university-20111006-story.html; Brian X. Chen, “Simplifying the Bull: How Picasso Helps to Teach Apple’s Style,” New York Times, August 10, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/11/technology/-inside-apples-internal-training-program-.html; Adam Lashinsky, Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired—and Secretive—Company Really Works (New York: Business Plus, 2012).
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As a scholar of status in organizations, now Podolny was tipped as a future university president himself. But in 2008, after just three years at Yale, Podolny abruptly resigned to reframe his own career. Steve Jobs had quietly courted Joel Podolny. Faced with the return of his cancer and the need to set Apple up to prosper without him, he convinced Podolny to join the company. Jobs wanted his legacy to be a team of executives who could “think different,” in the words of the company’s iconic advertising campaign. He hired Podolny to be the head of Apple University, where he needed to instill the importance of mental flexibility and of holding convictions but being ready to relinquish them for new perspectives.
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There is a risk, however, that just because someone has reframed successfully, they believe they can do it again and again. There can be a vainglory attached to reframers, who wear their achievement like a golden crown and reapply the new frame where it does not fit. The best innovators are aware of this and work to minimize it. Steve Jobs of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Larry Page of Google all enjoyed reputations for stubbornness but at the same time actively sought out alternative views that contradicted their own. They understood the shortcoming of relying on a single frame and the value of being exposed to alternative ones. One of the most notorious examples of a successful reframer becoming too attached to a frame is Albert Einstein.
pages: 403 words: 87,035 The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti
assortative mating, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business climate, call centre, cleantech, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, global village, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, medical residency, Menlo Park, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Sand Hill Road, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, thinkpad, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Wall-E, Y Combinator, zero-sum game
The first batch of two hundred Apple I computers was assembled by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in Jobs’s famous garage in Los Altos in 1976. Production didn’t stray far for a few years. During the 1980s, Apple was manufacturing most of its Macs in a factory in Fremont, California. But in 1992 Apple shut down the factory and shifted production first to cheaper parts of California and Colorado, then to Ireland and Singapore. All other American companies followed the model. As James Fallows once put it, “Everyone in America has heard of Dell, Sony, Compaq, HP, Lenovo-IBM ThinkPad, Apple, NEC, Gateway, Toshiba.
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Two of the jobs created by the multiplier effect are professional jobs—doctors and lawyers—while the other three benefit workers in nonprofessional occupations—waiters and store clerks. Take Apple, for example. It employs 12,000 workers in Cupertino. Through the multiplier effect, however, the company generates more than 60,000 additional service jobs in the entire metropolitan area, of which 36,000 are unskilled and 24,000 are skilled. Incredibly, this means that the main effect of Apple on the region’s employment is on jobs outside of high tech. (Incidentally, Apple is among Tim James’s clients: when Steve Jobs died, James was commissioned to make the family’s condolence book.) In essence, in Silicon Valley, high-tech jobs are the cause of local prosperity, and the doctors, lawyers, roofers, and yoga teachers are the effect.
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It is a mix of color science, computer science, and mathematics. He starts with equations and ends up with the amazingly colorful stories that have made Pixar the industry leader. Pixar’s creative genes run deep. The studio was founded by the iconic Star Wars director George Lucas and then acquired by Apple’s Steve Jobs and later by Disney. Since the beginning, the company’s identity has been an intense dialogue between art and technology. At first the technological side was dominant. In its early years, Pixar was mostly a computer hardware company. Its Pixar Image Computer was designed to perform graphic design for hospitals and medical research facilities, but at $135,000 it was too expensive to become successful.
pages: 372 words: 89,876 The Connected Company by Dave Gray, Thomas Vander Wal
A Pattern Language, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, business cycle, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, Googley, index card, industrial cluster, interchangeable parts, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, loose coupling, low cost airline, market design, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, profit maximization, Richard Florida, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Vanguard fund, web application, WikiLeaks, Zipcar
In 2001, Napster had already disrupted the music business, and there was no safe, easy, legitimate way to buy music online. While Apple’s Steve Jobs set out to recruit music companies and artists to offer their songs for sale on iTunes, Sony announced it would go forward with a proprietary format called Pressplay. Apple announced a rival technology called FairPlay. Both Pressplay and FairPlay protected the digital rights of any song bought online. But there was a critical difference. Sony’s Pressplay would only play authorized, protected files, but Apple’s FairPlay would protect files bought in their store, and also play any file in a user’s existing library. This made Apple’s platform more valuable, because users did not have to start from scratch to build a music library.
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In a recent interview, Gary Starkweather, inventor of the laser printer and former Xerox PARC researcher, told Malcolm Gladwell: “They just could not seem to see that they were in the information business… Xerox had been infested by a bunch of spreadsheet experts who thought you could decide every product based on metrics. Unfortunately, creativity wasn’t on a metric.” Apple founder Steve Jobs paid a visit to Xerox PARC in 1979. He was inspired. Xerox PARC engineer Larry Tesler reported to Gladwell: “Jobs was pacing around the room, acting up the whole time. He was very excited. Then, when he began seeing the things I could do onscreen, he watched for about a minute and started jumping around the room, shouting, ‘Why aren’t you doing anything with this? This is the greatest thing. This is revolutionary!’” Jobs went back to Apple, and the rest is history. Xerox may have learned its lesson. Today, the company is focused on moving from being a copier company to a services company.
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As resources accumulate, this constellation of capabilities and goals begins to coalesce into a working model, and possibly a new and innovative offering. The bottom line is that entrepreneurs focus on things that are within their direct control and try to make things happen. If life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. We have a tradition of making heroes out of entrepreneurs: people like Richard Branson of Virgin Media, Steve Jobs of Apple, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon. And indeed, they are amazing people. But they can also be intimidating. The deification of entrepreneurs can lead to a feeling of helplessness, the idea that we as individuals aren’t smart enough or visionary enough to pull it off. But the powerful message here is that anyone can be an entrepreneur.
pages: 428 words: 138,235 The Billionaire and the Mechanic: How Larry Ellison and a Car Mechanic Teamed Up to Win Sailing's Greatest Race, the Americas Cup, Twice by Julian Guthrie
Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Boeing 747, cloud computing, fear of failure, Ford paid five dollars a day, independent contractor, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Benioff, market bubble, Maui Hawaii, new economy, pets.com, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, warehouse automation, white picket fence, Yogi Berra
“Stick to radiators.” 5 Woodside, California Early Spring 2000 “I’M TALKING ABOUT GREATNESS, about taking a lever to the world and moving it,” Larry said, walking the grounds of his new Woodside property with his best friend Steve Jobs. “I’m not talking about moral perfection. I’m talking about people who changed the world the most during their lifetime.” Jobs, who had returned to Apple three years earlier, enjoyed the conversational volleying and placed Leonardo da Vinci and Gandhi as his top choices, with Gandhi in the lead. Leonardo, a great artist and inventor, lived in violent times and was a designer of tanks, battlements, ramparts, and an assortment of other military tools and castle fortifications.
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Chris is coming back to lead this team. He’s an exceptionally good tactician, and we need a good tactician. I know he’s intense. He’s also disciplined and decisive. He is the best sailor on this team. You can’t vote our best sailor off the team.” Sidelining Dickson, Larry said, was like the time in the 1980s when the Apple board replaced Steve Jobs with John Sculley. “How dumb was that?” Erkelens could see the level of dissension and unhappiness. It certainly wasn’t the Braveheart freedom speech Larry probably wanted, inspring his troops to pick up their swords and prepare for battle. Then another sailor raised his hand and said, “I thought we were here to have fun.”
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—Kirkus Reviews “From the opening scene in this book—and scene is the appropriate word for its cinematic beginning—the reader is swept along on heart-thumping rides on swift, dueling sailboats, past an assemblage of characters worthy of Dreiser, past the shoals of deceit worthy of Dickens, and coming to rest on the formidable character of billionaire Larry Ellison, who has the will-to-win of his best friend, Steve Jobs, and of a mechanic, who made winning possible. Julian Guthrie writes as if with a magic wand, holding the reader spellbound.” —Ken Auletta “Surely the most comprehensive book ever written about an America’s Cup challenge, The Billionaire and the Mechanic will surely be must reading for any yacht-racing aficionado.”
pages: 417 words: 97,577 The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper
Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, full employment, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, merger arbitrage, Metcalfe's law, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive investing, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, prediction markets, prisoner's dilemma, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, undersea cable, Vanguard fund, very high income, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, you are the product, zero-sum game
The list of Xerox's inventions is extraordinary: the graphical user interface, computer-generated bitmap images, WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editors, object-oriented programming, Ethernet cables, and workstations for DARPAnet.54 Yet the company did little with these innovations. It took Steve Jobs and Apple to license them and bring products to the public. Likewise, AT&T and RCA were extremely innovative companies, but other companies ultimately developed their key technologies, such as the transistor. AT&T and RCA stuck to phones and radio, and became the antithesis of originality.55 There is a reason why big companies are so bad at implementing new ideas. Steve Jobs rarely recommended books, but he liked The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. His 1997 book was embraced by Silicon Valley and called one of the six best business books ever by The Economist.56 Christensen's theory was that because successful companies cannot disrupt themselves; they leave themselves vulnerable to competition from upstarts because they abandon the lower end of the market.
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We often think in the U.S. that people or companies create success, but what Silicon Valley shows us is that often it's communities of people across a region.”3 If Noyce thought Shockley was God in the early 1950s, Steve Jobs idolized Noyce in the 1970s. When Apple was starting, Noyce was already a legend with Intel. “Bob Noyce took me under his wing,” Jobs said. “He tried to give me the lay of the land, give me a perspective that I could only partially understand.” Jobs continued, “You can't really understand what is going on now unless you understand what came before.”4 Although Jobs worshipped Noyce, he failed to give his own Apple employees the same freedoms that allowed Noyce's best innovations to flourish. In 2014 it came to light that Jobs had been preventing employees from moving to other companies.
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Mike McPhate, “California Today: Silicon Valley's Secret Sauce,” May 19, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/us/california-today-silicon-valley.html. 4. https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2011/1212/Robert-Noyce-Why-Steve-Jobs-idolized-Noyce. 5. Jim Edwards, “Emails from Google's Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin Show a Shady Agreement Not to Hire Apple Workers,” March 23, 2014, http://www.businessinsider.com/emails-eric-schmidt-sergey-brin-hiring-apple-2014-3. 6. Barry Levine, “4 Tech Companies Are Paying a $325M Fine for Their Illegal Non-compete Pact,” May 23, 2014, https://venturebeat.com/2014/05/23/4-tech-companies-are-paying-a-325m-fine-for-their-illegal-non-compete-pact/. 7.
pages: 394 words: 118,929 Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg
A Pattern Language, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, call centre, collaborative editing, conceptual framework, continuous integration, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, functional programming, George Santayana, Grace Hopper, Guido van Rossum, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, Internet Archive, inventory management, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Larry Wall, life extension, Loma Prieta earthquake, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, Mitch Kapor, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, scientific management, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, slashdot, software studies, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nelson, Therac-25, thinkpad, Turing test, VA Linux, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K
Totic and Montulli joined OSAF as volunteers around the same time that Kapor began to hire for other jobs, filling out the organization’s roster as it moved into the spotlight. The team was heavy with Apple alumni, who perhaps found in Kapor’s vision an echo of Steve Jobs’s change-the-world fervor. Taking on the job of Chandler’s product manager was Chi-Chao Lam, a veteran but still boyish Silicon Valley entrepreneur who had worked at Kaleida Labs, the ill-fated mid-1990s joint venture between IBM and Apple, then founded a pioneering Web-based advertising network. Pieter Hartsook, a longtime Macintosh trade journalist and industry analyst, signed on to handle OSAF’s marketing and PR.
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Mitch Kapor had always figured that the organization would depend on both paid employees and altruistic volunteers, and in Andy Hertzfeld it already had one high-profile example of the latter. The flurry of OSAF news coverage that followed Gillmor’s column filled Kapor’s inbox with encouragement and offers of help. Steve Jobs called Kapor—it was the two men’s first conversation in a decade—inviting the OSAF team down to Apple to talk about how they might collaborate. Kapor took special note when Lou Montulli’s name turned up in the signature of an email to OSAF’s just-opened “dev” mailing list—a message suggesting that OSAF look again at Mozilla’s toolkit for building its user interface.
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With Denman preparing for a paternity leave, OSAF brought in Bryan Stearns, an experienced programmer who had worked with Denman two decades before on the original Macintosh team, and Stearns took over the detail view. Alec Flett, a longtime Netscape developer who had taken some time off programming to work as a school-teacher, and Grant Baillie, a veteran of Steve Jobs’s Next who most recently had worked at Apple on its email program, joined in January. The new faces represented reinforcements for the long haul, but in the short term they each had to take some time to figure Chandler out. Brooks’s Law had not been repealed. Chandler was now 1.5 million lines of code, most of which had been incorporated from other projects like wxWidgets and Twisted.
pages: 421 words: 110,406 Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker
3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, business process, buy low sell high, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, digital map, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, Haber-Bosch Process, High speed trading, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, market design, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pre–internet, price mechanism, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipcar
Adobe Flash Player is a browser app that delivers Internet content to users, including audio/video playback and real-time game play. Flash could have been used by app developers on Apple’s iPhone operating system—but Apple prevented this by making its iOS incompatible with Flash and insisting that developers use similar tools created by Apple itself. Developers and users responded with dismay, and some observers called the policy an anti-competitive gambit that might be subject to governmental sanction under antitrust regulations. The furor grew so heated that, in 2010, Apple’s Steve Jobs felt compelled to defend the policy in an open letter—a highly unusual step for a CEO to take.
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Ironically, while Microsoft stopped retail sales of XP in 2008 and of Vista in 2010, XP’s market share in 2015 was above 12 percent, while that of Vista was below 2 percent.10 By contrast, when Steve Jobs returned to the leadership of Apple in 1997 after his years developing the ambitious but unsuccessful NeXT computer, he made a crucial decision that honored the end-to-end principle and helped lead to Apple’s subsequent success. At NeXT, Jobs and his team had developed an elegant new operating system with a clean, layered architecture and a beautiful graphical interface. Now, planning a successor to Apple’s Mac OS 9 operating system, Jobs faced a hard choice: he could merge the NeXT and Mac OS 9 software code, thereby producing an operating system that would be compatible with both systems, or he could jettison Mac OS 9 in favor of NeXT’s clean architecture.
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Inevitably, the market came crashing down. Beginning in March 2000, trillions of dollars’ worth of paper valuations vanished in a matter of months. Yet amid the rubble, certain companies survived. While Webvan and Pets.com disappeared, Amazon and eBay survived and thrived. Steve Jobs, who had lost Apple to mistakes he made earlier, recovered, returned to Apple, and built it into a juggernaut. Eventually, the online world emerged from the depths of the 2000 downturn to become stronger than ever. Why were some Internet-based businesses successful while others were not? Were the differences a matter of random luck, or were deeper design principles at work?
pages: 279 words: 71,542 Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport
Burning Man, Cal Newport, data science, Donald Trump, financial independence, game design, Hacker News, index fund, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Pepto Bismol, pre–internet, price discrimination, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs
“It was interesting,” Julie summarized, “but it certainly didn’t seem like this was something on which we would spend any real amount of time.” Three years later, Apple released the iPhone, sparking the mobile revolution. What many forget, however, was that the original “revolution” promised by this device was also much more modest than the impact it eventually created. In our current moment, smartphones have reshaped people’s experience of the world by providing an always-present connection to a humming matrix of chatter and distraction. In January 2007, when Steve Jobs revealed the iPhone during his famous Macworld keynote, the vision was much less grandiose. One of the major selling points of the original iPhone was that it integrated your iPod with your cell phone, preventing you from having to carry around two separate devices in your pockets.
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As Grignon then explained to me, Steve Jobs was initially dismissive of the idea that the iPhone would become more of a general-purpose mobile computer running a variety of different third-party applications. “The second we allow some knucklehead programmer to write some code that crashes it,” Jobs once told Grignon, “that will be when they want to call 911.” When the iPhone first shipped in 2007, there was no App Store, no social media notifications, no quick snapping of photos to Instagram, no reason to surreptitiously glance down a dozen times during a dinner—and this was absolutely fine with Steve Jobs, and the millions who bought their first smartphone during this period.
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Gregory Hays (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 18. “The mass of men lead lives”: Thoreau, Walden, 4. They honestly think: Thoreau, Walden, 5. CHAPTER 1: A LOPSIDED ARMS RACE “It’s the best iPod we’ve ever made!”: “Steve Jobs iPhone 2007 Presentation (HD),” YouTube video, 51:18, recorded January 9, 2007, posted by Jonathan Turetta, May 13, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN4U5FqrOdQ. “The killer app is making calls”: “Steve Jobs iPhone 2007.” “This was supposed to be an iPod”: Andy Grignon, phone interview by the author, September 7, 2017. “a moment can feel”: Laurence Scott, The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World (New York: W.
pages: 252 words: 78,780 Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons
Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, young professional
“They tell us we’re cute, we have a cute little lifestyle business,” Fried says. “Our employees have longer tenure with the company. Our people are happier. They spend time with their families. They get to enjoy the summer months. People tell me, ‘Steve Jobs could not have made Apple if he took Fridays off.’ Well, I’m not trying to make Apple. And I don’t care what Steve Jobs did.” In 2017, Fried and Hansson got into a prolonged Twitter debate with Keith Rabois, a well-known venture capitalist and minor Silicon Valley oligarch who insists workaholism is the only way to be successful. (To refresh your memory, Rabois is the guy who got in trouble at Stanford for shouting homophobic slurs.
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“Power to the people” was the slogan of 1960s, and it was also the motto of the people who led the personal computer revolution in the 1970s. Instead of sharing a mainframe, which was controlled by Big Brother, everyone could have their own computer. This was an incredibly radical idea, with huge implications for society. Wozniak and his Apple co-founder Steve Jobs were long-haired hippie-hackers who built their first personal computers as members of the Homebrew Computer Club, a pack of amateur kit-computer hobbyists. Wozniak was steeped in the people-first “HP Way.” Jobs was an LSD-taking, commune-dwelling hippie who often went barefoot and who was influenced by Stewart Brand, a proponent of psychedelic drugs who hung out with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.
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Previously, the kings of tech were the wizards who invented new products and built companies, like Hewlett and Packard, or Bill Gates at Microsoft, and Jobs and Wozniak at Apple. But now the power brokers include venture capitalists—like Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel of Clarium Capital and Founders Fund, and Reid Hoffman of Greylock Ventures. They don’t actually run tech companies. They’re just investors. Nevertheless, their profession is depicted as glamorous, and they rank among the biggest celebrities in Silicon Valley. Wired once lionized Andreessen on its cover, calling him “The Man Who Makes the Future.” Young guys moving west after college no longer hope to become the next Steve Jobs; they want to be the next Marc Andreessen.
pages: 331 words: 96,989 Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam L. Alter
Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bluma Zeigarnik, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, easy for humans, difficult for computers, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, IKEA effect, Inbox Zero, Kickstarter, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Oculus Rift, Richard Thaler, Robert Durst, side project, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, three-martini lunch
NOTES PROLOGUE: NEVER GET HIGH OR YOUR OWN SUPPLY At an Apple event: John D. Sutter and Doug Gross, “Apple Unveils the ‘Magical’ iPad,” CNN, January 28, 2010, www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/01/27/apple.tablet/. Video of the event: EverySteveJobsVideo, “Steve Jobs Introduces Original iPad—Apple Special Event,” December 30, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KN-5zmvjAo. In late 2010, Jobs: This section of views from tech experts comes from: Nick Bilton, “Steve Jobs Was a Low-Tech Parent,” New York Times, September 11, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/fashion/steve-jobs-apple-was-a-low-tech-parent.html. Many experts both: These snippets come from interviews with, among others, game designers Bennett Foddy and Frank Lantz, exercise addiction experts Leslie Sim and Katherine Schreiber, and reSTART Internet addiction clinic founder Cosette Rae.
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Social Interaction PART 3 THE FUTURE OF BEHAVIORAL ADDICTION (AND SOME SOLUTIONS) 10. Nipping Addictions at Birth 11. Habits and Architecture 12. Gamification Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Index Prologue: Never Get High on Your Own Supply At an Apple event in January 2010, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad: What this device does is extraordinary . . . It offers the best way to browse the web; way better than a laptop and way better than a smartphone . . . It’s an incredible experience . . . It’s phenomenal for mail; it’s a dream to type on. For ninety minutes, Jobs explained why the iPad was the best way to look at photos, listen to music, take classes on iTunes U, browse Facebook, play games, and navigate thousands of apps.
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Evan Williams, a founder of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium, bought hundreds of books for his two young sons, but refused to give them an iPad. And Lesley Gold, the founder of an analytics company, imposed a strict no-screen-time-during-the-week rule on her kids. She softened her stance only when they needed computers for schoolwork. Walter Isaacson, who ate dinner with the Jobs family while researching his biography of Steve Jobs, told Bilton that, “No one ever pulled out an iPad or computer. The kids did not seem addicted at all to devices.” It seemed as if the people producing tech products were following the cardinal rule of drug dealing: never get high on your own supply. This is unsettling. Why are the world’s greatest public technocrats also its greatest private technophobes?
pages: 237 words: 50,758 Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly by John Kay
Andrew Wiles, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, bonus culture, British Empire, business process, Cass Sunstein, computer age, corporate raider, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, discovery of penicillin, diversification, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, market fundamentalism, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, shareholder value, Simon Singh, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk
But they were wrong. The Soviet Union collapsed, the Pruitt-Igoe project was demolished and the people who transformed the business world were not the men who employed armies of reengineering consultants. The people who did transform the business world were those, like Google’s Sergey Brin and Apple’s Steve Jobs, who adopted a more oblique approach to business transformation. They chose to invent new businesses rather than reengineer old ones, they adapted and improvised endlessly and they carried employees and customers along with them on a wave of enthusiasm. Direct approaches make a distinction between means and ends that often does not exist in reality.
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The attempt to define the quality of artistic endeavor by predetermined rules had the effect—and the intention—of freezing creative innovation. In consequence, little work of enduring merit emerged.14 What is true of art is also true of other areas of human endeavor. What made Henry Ford or Walt Disney or Steve Jobs great businessmen was that they modified the rules by which their success, and the success of others in their industry, were measured. They changed our appreciation of what is good and bad in personal transport, in children’s entertainment, and in computing. They sold us products we had not imagined.
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No one will be buried with the epitaph “He maximized shareholder value,” not just because the objective is an unworthy intermediate goal rather than a high-level objective but because, even with hindsight, no one can tell whether the goal of maximum shareholder value was achieved. If shareholder value was indeed maximized at ICI or Boeing, it was maximized obliquely. The epitaph on men such as Henry Ford, or Bill Allen, or Walt Disney, or Steve Jobs reads instead: “He built a great business, which made money for shareholders, gave rewarding employment and stimulated the development of suppliers and distributors by meeting customers’ needs that they had not known they had before these men developed products to satisfy them.” Approaching high-level objectives in an oblique manner, they achieved many supporting goals.
pages: 232 words: 71,024 The Decline and Fall of IBM: End of an American Icon? by Robert X. Cringely
AltaVista, Bernie Madoff, business cycle, business process, cloud computing, commoditize, compound rate of return, corporate raider, financial engineering, full employment, if you build it, they will come, immigration reform, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, managed futures, Paul Graham, platform as a service, race to the bottom, remote working, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software as a service, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, Toyota Production System, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application
They just forgot about the content.” Steve Jobs had this exactly right when he said this in 1995, just two years after Gerstner came aboard to save IBM. The IPod and ITunes marked a Apple’s business started by people throughout Apple asking questions like “Why?” Apple was selling lots of iMac’s with CD burners. Why? People were ripping a lot of music. They were creating mixes of music, burning them on CDs for their personal CD players. Back in the 1990s portable music players were modestly popular items (especially the SONY Walkman) but they didn’t work very well. By asking a lot of questions Apple came up with the idea of the IPod and ITunes, a success that altered forever three industries—music, consumer electronics, and computers.
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Why IBM Can’t Change: What is IBM’s current answer to the question “Why?”? They don’t have an answer. They haven’t had one for decades. What would Steve Jobs say about IBM? Steve was hardly an ideal boss himself, but there’s no denying he knew how to effect corporate change in a way that kept Apple ahead of market trends and grew the company’s market cap by more than 500 times (50,000 percent!) during his tenure as CEO. I spoke with Steve about IBM in my film Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview and he put it in a very useful context for this chapter: “If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox—so you make a better copier or a better computer, so what?
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It gets people to talk. It gets them to share ideas. It leads to brainstorming. When the collective intelligence of the employees of a company is focused on a problem or an idea, powerful things can happen. This has not happened in IBM for years. In the years that followed my video interview with Steve Jobs in 1995, IBM’s Global Services division became the cash engine of the corporation. But when other companies got into the IT outsourcing business IBM began to face serious competition. For a few years IBM resisted change, and tried to sell the IBM name and reputation. In a competitive market PRICE SELLS.
pages: 327 words: 88,121 The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community by Marc J. Dunkelman
Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, Broken windows theory, business cycle, call centre, clean water, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Brooks, delayed gratification, different worldview, double helix, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, helicopter parent, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, invention of movable type, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Richard Florida, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban decay, urban planning, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game
When we think about the economy, for example, we’re conventionally plied with statistics—potential demographic shifts or changing interest rates—that invariably affect the business cycle. Alternatively, we seek out individual stories—how Steve Jobs managed to lead Apple to the top of the tech heap, for example—and ask how they apply to the broader economy. From these two strategies, we try to develop a more comprehensive understanding of how the economy works. And in some cases that strategy works. But without a sense of what’s happening in the middle, we’re often left without the whole picture. Was Apple’s success the result of Jobs’s legendary understanding of consumer desires or of the fact that Apple’s engineers and marketing departments were so thoroughly integrated into the design process?
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Man’s knowledge of the changes of the tides and the phases of the moon is as old as his observation that apples fall to earth in the ripeness of time. Yet the combination of these and other equally familiar data in Newton’s theory of gravity changed mankind’s outlook on the world.6 The same process applies to the great inventions of the last few years—even though we may be inclined to give credit to the apparent genius of one person. The iPhone didn’t emerge sui generis out of Steve Jobs’s head. No team at Apple could have invented such a device in 1975, if only because the constituent ideas that merged to place a graphically integrated handheld device into the adjacent possible hadn’t yet been invented.
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Americans now celebrate, more than nearly anything else, an individual’s capacity to resist the pressure to put on airs. You might be poor or lonely; you may have lost your job or your marriage. But what’s important is that you not lose yourself. That’s reflected in the personalities who have become our role models: Steve Jobs for steering Apple in its own direction; Paul Farmer for taking the road less traveled in Haiti; Aung San Suu Kyi for standing up to dictators in Burma. Our heroes remain steadfast in what they believe despite overwhelming pressure to change or back down. That’s why the struggle to “be yourself” resonates with television audiences.
pages: 501 words: 114,888 The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler
Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamonds, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, food miles, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize
Force #1: Saved Time In “The Original Macintosh,” a collection of online anecdotes about the creation of that fabled machine, Apple computer scientist Andy Hertzfeld recounted a typical Steve Jobs story. It’s typical, because, in this story, like in so many others, Jobs was frustrated. The issue was speed. The first Mac was supposed to be a very fast computer. And it was, at least on paper. Built around Motorola’s 68000 microprocessor, the system was actually ten times faster than the Apple II. But it had limited RAM, making it necessary to upload extra info via floppy discs. And this was especially true during startup—which would occasionally drag on for minutes.
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Because of the convergence of high bandwidth 5G connections, augmented reality eyewear, our emerging trillion-sensors economy, and, to stitch it all together, powerful AI, we have gained the ability to superimpose digital information atop physical environments—freeing advertising from the tyranny of the screen. Imagine stepping into a future Apple Store. When you approach the iPhone display, a full-sized AR avatar of Steve Jobs materializes. He wants to give you a tour of the product’s latest features. Avatar Jobs is a little too much, so with nothing more than a voice command, he’s replaced with floating text—and a list of phone features hovers in the air in front of you. After you’ve made your selection, eschewing the iPhone for a new pair of AR iGlasses, another voice command is all it takes to execute a smart contract.
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Musk delivered this promise at the end of an hour-long keynote to five thousand aerospace executives and government officials. The presentation was primarily an update about SpaceX’s megarocket, Starship, which was designed to take humans to Mars. The fact that Musk now wanted to use his interplanetary starship for terrestrial passenger delivery was the transportation industry equivalent of Steve Jobs’s famous line that (almost) ended his demos: “Wait, wait… There’s one more thing.” The Starship travels at 17,500 mph. It’s an order of magnitude faster than the Concorde. Think about what this actually means: New York to Shanghai in thirty-nine minutes. London to Dubai in twenty-nine minutes.
pages: 269 words: 70,543 Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global by Rebecca Fannin
Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, family office, fear of failure, fulfillment center, glass ceiling, global supply chain, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, QR code, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, young professional
Soon, DJI will be moving to a new headquarters that reflects the ambitions of its founder, Frank Wang, a press-shy product genius who was inspired by Steve Jobs’ dictum: design the product first and see how the market responds. DJI’s new flashy home in Shenzhen is a futuristic twin skyscraper designed by Foster & Partners, the same architect as for Apple’s orbit-like base in Cupertino. The plush building features cantilevered floors, a sky bridge where drones will be tested, and even a robot-fighting ring. The Apple of Drones DJI has positioned itself as the Apple of drones. Rumors have popped up that Apple would buy DJI as the iPhone maker mulls an entry into the drone market.
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CHAPTER 3 ________________ GAINING FAST: CHINA’S NEXT TECH TITANS The next group of up-and-comers is right behind China’s BAT and leading the future for smartphones that rival Apple, internet-connected smart homes, superapps for speedy on-demand takeout lunches, plus 15-second video thrills and AI-fed news. XIAOMI: The Apple of the East Chinese tech entrepreneur Lei Jun is sometimes called the Steve Jobs of Apple. An entrepreneur celebrity in China much as Jobs was in Silicon Valley, he launched China’s smartphone maker Xiaomi in the spirit of Jobs and copied his products and style down to blue jeans and black T-shirt attire and stage presentations for new iPhones and iPads, even once teasing an introduction with the adopted line “Just one more thing.”
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But in the span of little more than a decade since I wrote Silicon Dragon,1 which was the first chronicle of China’s emerging Silicon Valley, the world’s second-largest economy and its expanding tech empire can no longer be underestimated. Today, young people in China looking for role models think of Robin Li, Jack Ma, and Pony Ma (founders of Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, respectively) more than they do Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, or Steve Jobs of Apple. High-tech China is inventing the next new thing at a rapid clip in frontier technologies: artificial intelligence, biotech, green energy, robotics, and superfast mobile communications. China also is angling to get ahead in fifth-generation wireless standards, which is being compared in impact to the invention of the Gutenberg printing press.2 Large sweeps of the Chinese economy—transportation, commerce, finance, health care, entertainment, and communications—are being reimagined and reshaped by China’s assertive effort to forge ahead by leveraging technology.
pages: 315 words: 93,522 How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy by Stephen Witt
4chan, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, cloud computing, collaborative economy, crowdsourcing, game design, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, inventory management, iterative process, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, job automation, late fees, mental accounting, moral panic, operational security, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, Ronald Reagan, security theater, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, software patent, Steve Jobs, Tipper Gore, zero day
Although the group behind Ogg denied infringing on Brandenburg’s patents, with a few careful words Fraunhofer made their feelings known to the device manufacturers, and the format sunk into obscurity. The second was Apple. Like Brandenburg, Steve Jobs disapproved of file-sharing, and was seeking to create a legal paid alternative. He was building a music application called iTunes, whose calm, white interface and slick, expensive iconography promised to cleanse the world of sin. The design flaws of Winamp would be swept away, the file-sharers of Napster would be given moral instruction in the virtues of paid distribution, and—Apple’s representatives were insistent on this point—the mp3 format would be abandoned. Jobs wanted everyone to use AAC.
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The brain trust was replaced by Jean-Bernard Lévy, a respected, sober-minded businessman tasked with stopping the bleeding. Needing an immediate influx of cash, Lévy organized the sale of Vivendi’s water utility and environmental engineering assets, and began looking for other things of value to sell. Word got around. In 2003, Apple CEO Steve Jobs made an unsolicited bid to take Universal off of Vivendi’s hands. He wanted their back catalog. He wanted his own music label. Most of all he wanted Morris. Morris was interested, but the decision wasn’t his to make. Vivendi rebuffed the offer. Even with their creditors demanding liquidity, and even with music industry revenues beginning to decline sharply, they saw UMG and Morris as key, irreplaceable assets.
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In fact, Morris’ aggregate return on invested capital during the first decade of the 2000s was splendid, and when you added it all up, B still looked a lot better than A. No one at the other major labels could say the same. Perhaps it was for this reason that, as word began to spread of his upcoming force-out, Steve Jobs began to call more frequently. Soon there was an offer on the table. Leave Vivendi, said Jobs. Come to Apple. We’ll start our own iTunes imprint. We’ll go after artists aggressively, and you’ll run the greatest music label the world has ever seen. Jobs was looking to rewrite the economics of the business from a blank slate. Historically, recording industry deals were determined by major labels bidding against one another for the right to represent the artists.
pages: 226 words: 65,516 Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts
"side hustle", 4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple II, Bernie Sanders, Bertram Gilfoyle, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double helix, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, forensic accounting, hacker house, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, index fund, information security, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Network effects, offshore financial centre, open borders, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, transaction costs, WeWork, Y Combinator, zero-sum game
In works like Collaborative Circles and Powers of Two, researchers have shown how genius is rarely solitary: John Lennon and Paul McCartney relied on each other to compose timeless Beatles hits; Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque used their brushes side by side to create Cubism; biologists James Watson and Francis Crick worked intensely together to discover the double helix and DNA. Tech is no different. Apple is famously associated with Steve Jobs, but, in its early days, the computer company wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without the other Steve—Jobs’s partner and programming virtuoso Steve Wozniak. The same is true with Google. The Stanford graduate supervisor of Larry Page and Sergey Brin has remarked on the near total mind-meld of the search engine founders. And a garage in Palo Alto, known as the birthplace of Silicon Valley and now an official California state landmark, did not belong to a lone inventor but to two men: Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, who founded HP.
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Since the 1930s, this special strip of California has produced entrepreneurs whose work has in turn inspired other entrepreneurs to push technology forward. These include a young Steve Jobs who, when asked why he spent so much time hangingaround the semiconductor pioneers of the 1960s, spoke reverently of their magic. “[I] wanted to smell that second wonderful era of the valley, the semiconductor companies leading into the computer. You can’t really understand what is going on now unless you understand what came before,” the Apple founder told the historian Leslie Berlin. Bitcoin must also be understood by what came before and, in particular, a group of technologists known as cypherpunks.
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But in true Silicon Valley fashion, Brian thought it best to think big, and he had Coinbase’s board behind him. However, first he would have to inspire Coinbase’s own employees. Giant and far-flung business visions are usually associated with Valley and tech CEOs who have outsize personalities. Steve Jobs is the archetype. Even as the late Apple CEO introduced some of the most profoundly disruptive technology the world has ever seen, he nourished a cult of personality with his distinct appearance and a stage presence worthy of P. T. Barnum. Elon Musk, who runs both the electric car company Tesla and the rocket maker SpaceX, likes to share extravagant plans for living on Mars and building high-speed tunnels between US cities.
pages: 580 words: 125,129 Androids: The Team That Built the Android Operating System by Chet Haase
Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, commoditize, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, Firefox, Google Chrome, Ken Thompson, Menlo Park, PalmPilot, Parkinson's law, pull request, QWERTY keyboard, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, turn-by-turn navigation, web application
Bob Borchers was the Senior Director of iPhone Product Marketing370 at Apple during the iPhone’s development and when it launched. Bob was in the original iPhone tutorial video on the Apple website when the iPhone was launched. What was remarkable about that video was not so much that it was an iPhone tutorial, or that it featured Bob, but that it was not starring Steve Jobs. Apple is famous in the industry for hiding most of the personalities in the company behind very closed doors. Only select people are anointed to be the face that represents the company. At that time, it was (of course) mostly Steve Jobs. A friend who worked there explained it to me.
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But Be’s impact on computing platforms is huge, if for no other reason than that it collected, either as employees or as avid users and developers, so many of the people who later went on to form Android.21 Be was a late entrant to the desktop computing wars, coming along in the early 1990s with a new OS that attempted to compete with the entrenched Microsoft and Apple desktop systems. It didn’t fare well. Be tried various things along the way. They sold their own computer hardware (the BeBox). They ported BeOS to PC and Mac hardware and attempted selling the OS. They were almost acquired by Apple (in fact, they got an offer, but while Be’s CEO was stalling as a negotiating ploy, Steve Jobs swooped in and convinced Apple to buy his company, NeXT Computer, instead). In 1999, they went through an underwhelming initial public offering (IPO).22 Then in 2000, when nobody was buying Be’s hardware or OS, the company tried what the team called a “Focus Shift,” building an OS for an Internet appliance device, which people also didn’t buy.
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A very simple example is that the sum of all integers up to some given integer x can be solved by adding x to the sum of all integers up to (x –1). Recursion is a powerful technique, but can be tricky to think through, and to ensure that it will actually terminate. 130 Taligent was a company formed by Apple and IBM with the goal of providing a new operating system, at a time when Apple was trying to come up with a successor to the aging MacOS. Taligent eventually failed and Apple continued its attempts internally before eventually acquiring Steve Jobs’s NeXT Computer and adopting NeXTSTEP OS instead. 131 Continuous Integration, or CI, is the practice in software development of integrating all of a team’s changes as often as possible for building and testing.
pages: 349 words: 95,972 Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford
affirmative action, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Basel III, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Erdős number, experimental subject, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, game design, global supply chain, Googley, Guggenheim Bilbao, Helicobacter pylori, high net worth, Inbox Zero, income inequality, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, microbiome, out of africa, Paul Erdős, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, telemarketer, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche
There was no need to save money using thin concrete walls. The Steve Jobs Building, named after Jobs’s death, is crafted of steel and glass, wood and brick, and Jobs obsessed over every detail. (It is easy to forget that the building also had an architect: Peter Bohlin, who designed the Apple stores.) Huge, beautiful steels were chosen after Jobs had pored over samples from across the country and selected a particular steel mill in Arkansas. He insisted that the girders were bolted rather than welded.4 And like all good designers, Steve Jobs cared about function as well as form. “Steve had this firm belief that the right kind of building can do great things for a culture,” says Ed Catmull, Pixar’s president.
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Ed Catmull with Amy Wallace, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration (London: Bantam, 2014), chap. 2. 3. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (London: Little, Brown, 2011), p. 486. 4. Ibid., pp. 430–432. 5. The first Ed Catmull quotation is from Isaacson, Steve Jobs, p. 430. The second is from Catmull with Wallace, Creativity, Inc., p. ix. 6. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, pp. 430–432. 7. Julie Jargon, “Neatness Counts at Kyocera and at Others in the 5S Club: Sort, Straighten, Shine, Standardize, Sustain; Getting Mr. Scovie to Go Through His Boxes,” The Wall Street Journal, October 27, 2008, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122505999892670159. 8.
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They added old-fashioned shutters and windows; they erected pitched roofs over the flat ones; they put up flowery wallpaper over the uninterrupted monochrome walls, and marked out little blocks of garden with wooden picket fences. Their gardens were decorated with gnomes. • • • Steve Jobs, one suspects, would not have approved of the gnomes. Jobs, like Le Corbusier, loved simplicity and clean modern lines—although unlike Le Corbusier, Steve Jobs had a gift for making things that people loved. Jobs is most famous for his work on computers, phones, and tablets, galvanizing outstanding designers for three decades to produce some of the most beautifully crafted technology in the world.
pages: 281 words: 71,242 World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer
artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism
• • • THE BIG TECH COMPANIES didn’t just benefit from the economic collapse of knowledge. They maneuvered to shred the value of knowledge, so that old media would come to helplessly depend on their platforms. There was a precedent for this strategy. When Apple created the iPod, it created a device with the capacity to hold thousands of digitized songs—ideal for amassing pirated music, which was flowing freely at that moment. Steve Jobs could have easily designed the iPod to make it inhospitable to stolen music. But he initially refused to build the iPod so that it would block unlicensed content. At the same time Jobs’s device enabled piracy, Jobs himself decried digital thievery.
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“This was a way to be of use to communes without actually having to live on one,” he would later joke. His truck never quite took off, but the core concept morphed into something much bigger and more resonant. He created the Whole Earth Catalog, which was really more like an entirely new literary genre—or what Steve Jobs called “one of the bibles of my generation.” During its four years of existence, the Whole Earth Catalog sold 2.5 million copies and won a National Book Award. The subtitle of the catalog was “access to tools.” There were plenty described in its pages, though it didn’t actually sell any, except from a storefront that Brand operated in the heart of what would become Silicon Valley.
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The engineers had indeed begun to develop machines that were a decade ahead of their time, and too radical for the corporate suits at Xerox to fully comprehend. Their most legendary prototype was a computer with many of the elements that would later appear in the Macintosh—no coincidence, because Steve Jobs was enraptured by the innovations he witnessed in a highly mythologized visit to PARC in the winter of 1979. But what made Brand’s article so influential is that he took the impulses of the engineers and translated them into pithy phrases—and these pithy phrases, in turn, gave direction to the work of the engineers.
pages: 238 words: 73,824 Makers by Chris Anderson
3D printing, Airbnb, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, business process, commoditize, Computer Numeric Control, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, Elon Musk, factory automation, Firefox, future of work, global supply chain, global village, hockey-stick growth, IKEA effect, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, Network effects, private space industry, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, spinning jenny, Startup school, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Y Combinator
As then, the sudden liberation of industrial technology inspires exuberant imagination and some sweeping predictions (including here). The leaders of the Maker Movement echo the fervor of Steve Jobs, who saw in the personal computer not just the opportunity to start a company but also a force that would change the world. But don’t forget: he was right. Indeed, Jobs himself was inspired by his Maker upbringing. Writing in Wired,12 Steven Levy explained the connection, which led to the original Apple II in 1977: His dad, Paul—a machinist who had never completed high school—had set aside a section of his workbench for Steve, and taught him how to build things, disassemble them, and put them together.
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“It gave a tremendous sense of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one’s environment,” he told [an] interviewer. Later, when Jobs and his Apple cofounder, Steve Wozniak, were members of the Homebrew Computer Club, they saw the potential of desktop tools—in this case the personal computer—to change not just people’s lives, but also the world. In this, they were inspired by Stewart Brand, who had emerged from the psychedelic culture of the 1960s to work with the early Silicon Valley visionaries to promote technology as a form of “computer liberation,” which would free both the minds and the talents of people in a way that drugs had not. In his biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson describes Brand’s role in the origins of what is today the Maker Movement: Brand ran the Whole Earth Truck Store, which began as a roving truck that sold useful tools and educational materials, and in 1968 he decided to extend its reach with The Whole Earth Catalog.
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Then, in 1985, Apple released the LaserWriter, the first real desktop laser printer, which, along with the Mac, started the desktop publishing phenomenon. It was a jaw-dropping moment, combining in the public imagination words that had never gone together before: “desktop” and “publishing”! Famously, Apple’s printer had more processing power than the Mac itself, which was necessary to interpret the Postscript page description language that was originally designed for commercial printers costing ten times as much. But Steve Jobs wanted the Mac desktop publishing suite not just to match the quality of commercial printers, but to exceed them. Desktop tools could be better than traditional industrial tools, he believed, and he started by cutting no corners.
pages: 598 words: 183,531 Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition by Steven Levy
air freight, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, Donald Knuth, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, game design, Gary Kildall, Hacker Ethic, hacker house, Haight Ashbury, John Conway, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, Paul Graham, popular electronics, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, software patent, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator
—and get excited and show other people and say, ‘Look, this is easy, you just put this command in and you do this.’” Here was this high school kid, running programs on this little computer Wozniak had built. Steve Jobs’ reaction was more pragmatic—he hired Chris Espinosa as one of the company’s first employees. Like the other teen-age software specialist, Randy Wigginton, he would earn three dollars an hour. Steve Jobs was concentrating full-time on building up the Apple company to get ready to deliver the Apple II the following year and make a big splash in the marketplace. Jobs was a brilliant talker who, according to Alan Baum, “worked his tail off . . . he told me about the prices he was getting for parts, and they were favorable to the prices HP was paying.”
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Woz and his friends were preparing a different kind of computer than the previous bestsellers, the Altair, Sol, and IMSAI. Steve Jobs and Mike Markkula felt that the Apple’s market went well beyond hobbyists, and to make the machine look friendlier. Jobs hired an industrial designer to construct a sleek, low-profile plastic case in a warm beige earth color. He made sure that Woz’s layout would be appealing once the lid of the case was lifted. The Apple bus, like the S-100 bus, was capable of accepting extra circuit boards to make it do interesting things, but Woz had taken some advice from his friend Alan Baum and made it so that the eight “expansion slots” inside the Apple were especially easy for manufacturers to make compatible circuit boards for.
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Anyone in Homebrew could take a look at the schematics for the design, Woz’s BASIC was given away free with purchase of a piece of equipment that connected the computer to a cassette recorder, and Woz published the routines for his 6502 “monitor,” which enabled you to look into memory and see what instructions were stored, in magazines like Dr. Dobbs. The Apple ad even said, “our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost.” While the selling was going on, Steve Wozniak began working on an expanded design of the board, something that would impress his Homebrew peers even more. Steve Jobs had plans to sell many computers based on this new design, and he started getting financing, support, and professional help for the day the product would be ready. The new version of Steve Wozniak’s computer would be called the Apple II, and at the time no one suspected that it would become the most important computer in history
pages: 521 words: 118,183 The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg
2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, data is the new oil, data science, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, tech worker, technoutopianism, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game
In fact, we’re so used to this competitive edge that we think it will always be this way. But what if it isn’t? In 2007, when Steve Jobs upended the mobile phone market by introducing the iPhone, Nokia’s market valuation was $110 billion, $6 billion more than Apple. A dozen years later, Apple’s valuation had grown nearly 80 percent, and Nokia’s was down more than two-thirds. With China charging ahead and other autocracies close behind, what if the United States is on the verge of becoming the Nokia to China’s Apple? From Beijing to Moscow to Tehran, our adversaries are now developing—or in some cases have already developed—new digital weapons of war that will revolutionize their ability to do us harm.
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Still fewer likely dwell on where so many of these supply chains lead. More often than not, the answer is the warehouses and factory floors of China. A few decades ago, many tech companies did manufacture their devices in the United States. Apple’s Steve Jobs boasted that the early Macintosh was “a machine that is made in America.”33 At the turn of the twenty-first century, iMacs were still being produced in Elk Grove, California, only a couple hours’ drive from Apple’s Cupertino headquarters.34 Times have changed. Manufacturing as a share of American gross domestic product has dropped to its lowest level in more than seventy years.35 Over the past four decades, more than seven million American manufacturing jobs were lost36—over a third of the entire manufacturing workforce—including five million just since 2000.37 Onetime American hardware giants like Lucent, Motorola, and General Electric have disappeared or seen their global dominance eroded.
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Workers aged twenty-two to forty-four make up 61 percent of the American information technology workforce, compared to less than 49 percent of the overall workforce.43 At Apple, the median employee is—by tech standards—a comparatively mature thirty-one. At Google, the age is thirty. Facebook’s average employee is twenty-eight years old.44 “Is 27 the Tech World’s New Middle Age?” read one Fast Company headline.45 This cult of youth is reflected in the legends built around Silicon Valley’s iconic founders. Mark Zuckerberg, a decade and a half after he dropped out of Harvard to found Facebook, is still just thirty-six years old—and looks even younger. Bill Gates wasn’t even old enough to drink legally when he founded Microsoft at age nineteen. Steve Jobs launched Apple at twenty-one.
pages: 388 words: 106,138 The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory by John Seabrook
barriers to entry, financial independence, game design, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, trade route
Who would have imagined, as one label head put it, that “your enemy could become your friend”? One factor in the evolution of the labels’ thinking was Apple, which had proved to be an unsatisfactory business partner. The iTunes store, the industry’s attempt, in partnership with Apple, to build a digital record shop, opened in 2003 to sell downloads, but that didn’t alter the downward trajectory of sales revenues; indeed, by unbundling tracks from the album so that buyers could cherry-pick their favorite songs, Apple arguably hastened the decline. Music had been an important part of Apple’s business when Steve Jobs first negotiated the iTunes licenses, back in 2002—the music helped sell the iPod.
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Neither service would license to the other one, which crippled them both. With the sense of urgency mounting, Steve Jobs, Apple’s founder, stepped into the breach with a cool proposal—the iTunes music store. Roger Ames, head of Warner Music Group, saw Jobs’s presentation as the future. “Yes, yes, that’s exactly what we’ve been waiting for,” he said. One by one, his fellow leaders signed on to Jobs’s plan. Finally, Jobs went to see Doug Morris himself, and won the record man over with his charm. “When I met Steve, I thought he was our savior,” Morris told writer Walter Isaacson in Steve Jobs. Morris called Jimmy Iovine at Interscope to get his impression.
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As Denniz once said, in response to a question about how hard could it possibly be to write such simple songs, “it’s much more difficult to make it simple, especially achieving a simplicity without having it sound incredibly trivial.” Lundin says, “Denniz was an arrangement genius.” He adds, “like Steve Jobs, he knew what to take out. ‘You can get rid of that, that. Keep it simple.’ ” As Denniz put it, “A great pop song should be interesting, in some way. That means that certain people will hate it immediately and certain people will love it, but only as long as it isn’t boring and meaningless. Then it’s not a pop song any longer; then it’s something else.
pages: 380 words: 109,724 Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar
"side hustle", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, cleantech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, death of newspapers, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game
Some of the new crop of hyped-up companies may eventually turn into Cheshire cats, disappearing and leaving behind only the grins of those who got out before the bubble burst.24 CHAPTER 5 Darkness Rises Before he died, Steve Jobs told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that he intended to devote his remaining time on earth to annihilating Google’s Android phone system, which he believed that Eric Schmidt—a man he’d invited to sit on his board, and whom he considered to be a close friend—had wantonly copied from Apple’s iPhone. “I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong,” Jobs said. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product.”1 He didn’t get the chance, obviously, though he certainly tried, filing one patent infringement lawsuit after another, to no avail.
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When it happens in Silicon Valley, however, it typically also means that one or both companies are trying to prevent their top talent from absconding to a competitor—and taking their proprietary information, ideas, and secrets along with them. In 2011, court documents revealed that in 2007, after Steve Jobs called Google to complain that a recruiter was trying to hire one of his people, Schmidt wrote an email to HR saying, “I believe we have a policy of no recruiting from Apple….Can you get this stopped and let me know why this is happening? I will need to send a response back to Apple quickly.”37 While at Google, Schmidt instituted a “Do Not Call” list of companies that could not be tapped for talent, something that was legally dicey, since it basically undermined the ability of individuals to look for work.
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Rob Copeland and Eliot Brown, “Palantir Has a $20 Billion Valuation and a Bigger Problem: It Keeps Losing Money,” The Wall Street Journal, November 12, 2018. 23. Foroohar, “Money, Money, Money.” 24. Rana Foroohar, “Another Tech Bubble Could Be About to Burst,” Financial Times, January 27, 2019. Chapter 5: Darkness Rises 1. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011). 2. Dan Levine, “Apple, Google Settle Smartphone Patent Litigation,” Reuters, May 16, 2014. 3. Shanthi Rexaline, “10 Years of Android: How the Operating System Reached 86% Market Share,” MSN News, September 25, 2018. 4. Betsy Morris and Deepa Seetharaman, “The New Copycats: How Facebook Squashes Competition from Startups,” The Wall Street Journal, August 9, 2017. 5.
pages: 391 words: 105,382 Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr
Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisibl