Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on August 29
Reading through Bloomberg News’ mistakenly published obituary today has got me to thinking a little bit about how history will remember Steve Jobs.
In case you missed it, Jobs joined scores of other notable people who over the years have seen their pre-written obituaries prepared long in advance of such articles ever being needed, published by mistake on the Bloomberg News wires.
News organizations routinely write obituaries of notable people years, and sometimes decades in advance of their deaths so that they can ready for publication on short notice. These obits not supposed to see the light of day until the subject of the obituary actually dies, but occasionally they do. Wikipedia even has a page on the subject. The reporters at Bloomberg were probably taking advantage of a slow news cycle to update their files and pressed the wrong button. Notable similar cases include those of Mark Twain, Bob Hope, Vice-President Cheney, former President Gerald Ford and many others.
But the whole incident got me to thinking about Jobs, his life story so far, his legacy, and how history will judge him in say, 50 or 100 years.
Jobs is the kind of CEO that contemporary journalists and business biographers love: The story of his career has humble beginnings, has over the decades followed a dramatic arc, is filled with lots of telling anecdotes betraying an intriguing, cunning and ultimately fascinating personality. But how will he stand up against the titans of American industrial like JP Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, or Howard Hughes?
In terms of overall wealth, he’s not in their class. The latest Forbes estimate of his wealth is $5.4 billion, and impressive as it is, by that measure alone, it’s small compared to many other great American fortunes. As a percentage of the $14 trillion U.S. economy, which is the measure The New York Times used last year when it built a list of the “Wealthiest Americans Ever” it amounts to 0.04% of the economy, while Bill Gates’ fortune in 2007 amounted to more 0.59% of the economy.
And the great names of American industry are also associated with their philanthropic work, and the charitable foundations that have outlived them. Jobs isn’t widely known for his association with philanthropic causes. Neither he nor wife Laurene Powell Jobs are mentioned on any of the lists of major philanthropic gifts, though it’s certainly possible if not likely that they make anonymous gifts and as such never see any publicity for them. Apple has however been criticized as one of America’s Least Philanthropic Companies by the Stanford Social Innovation Review. (There's that nagging question about the huge pile of cash Apple is sitting on again.) Here Gates would again, appear to have eclipsed Jobs via the $33 billion Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
I asked the historian Douglas Brinkley of Rice University about this. He thinks Jobs will clearly be seen as an important character in the narrative of his era, but in a second tier. “Bill Gates will have huge Pulitzer Price-winning biographies written about him,” Brinkley says. “When people look back on the boom in Silicon Valley and the revolution in computers Jobs will be remembered as a player in the group portrait of that era, though not a dominant figure of that era. … His story will certainly be studied, and its an important one, but not in the way that others will be.”
But are wealth and visible philanthropy the only gauges by which history judges great business leaders? How about cultural impact? Look at the many places where the life’s work of Steve Jobs has impacted the daily lives of millions:
-He was directly responsible for making personal computing accessible to the average person, and for seeing the potential that computing could have when given to average people.
-Through the iPod and iTunes, he and his company all but fully upended the 100+ year old recording industry first established by none other than Thomas Edison. More than 150 million iPods have shipped in the course of five years, and the effects it has had on the consumption of media in the last five years is something that’s not yet fully understood, and one that future media and cultural historians will debate alongside the long-term effects of radio, television and the Internet itself.
-The historial impact of the iPhone, a device for which Jobs seems to want to be remembered is as yet hard to gauge, but its potential for having an iPod-like seismic effect is certainly there. Personal computing can now be concentrated in a handheld device. While we in the present debate the finer points of the iPhone and the iPhone 3G, I have to wonder if historians will look upon the iPhone as an important technological and cultural panacea like the personal computer itself, or as a fad that had run its course within a decade only to be replaced by another more fabulous shiny new thing.
-His company, in no small part because of his personal aesthetic, has left an indelible influence on the way products are designs. Every major Apple product quickly spawns imitators, from iPhone knock-offs, to music players that tried to mimic the iPods look and feel to other products that aim to borrow from and re-interpret Apple’s design language to their own needs.
-Pixar, a company he acquired during his years outside Apple, and the changes it wrought on entertainment will also be well-remembered. Animated films, long an important cultural touchstone of American life are all now computer-generated; Not just anyone becomes the majority shareholder of such a bedrock American company as Disney.
-Then there's the tale of Apple itself, one told so many times that school kids in Silicon Valley can probably recite the details from memory. Along with Hewlett-Packard, Apple is the very archetype of a company started in garage, its founders two precocious 20-somethings who saw technology as a means to change the world. You know the rest that followed: The boardroom confrontation and Jobs’ ouster; The years in the wilderness; The return; Saving the company from certain doom with the iMac; iPod and iPhone Madness; The Mac once again rising to challenge Microsoft’s dominance.
Maybe the story so far, compelling as it is, hasn’t yet risen to the level of importance that future historians will consider a first-tier subject for study. But as we’ve been reminded by the detailed reading of the Bloomberg obit, the story of Steve Jobs has been marked by many, many surprises along the long and winding road. And thankfully, it’s not over yet.
Posted by: Peter Burrows on August 21
iPhone 3G users might be suffering some reception problems when it comes to mobile browsing of the Net. But judging from Engadget's analysis of its traffic, owners of iPhones and iPod Touches are getting through a whole lot more than users of any other kind of non-PC device. Actually, it's not a question of more. It's a question of only--as in, the only non-PC devices being used by Engadget fans to any significant degree are these two Apple devices.
Check this out:
Top 25 mobile / non-desktop devices hitting engadget.com (Jan 1, 2008 - Aug 20, 2008)
Note: some in the top 25 have few enough views that they don't constitute 1/10th of a percent (hence 0.0%). These stats don't include m.engadget.com
Apple iPhone - 79.8%
Apple iPod Touch - 16.0%
Nintendo Wii - 1.1%
HTC P3650 (aka Touch Cruise) - 0.5%
Nokia N95 8GB - 0.4%
Nokia N95 - 0.3%
HTC X7500 - 0.2%
LG VX10000 Voyager - 0.2%
Nokia E90 - 0.2%
Nokia N82 - 0.1%
Nokia E51 - 0.1%
Nokia N95-3 NAM - 0.1%
Palm Treo 755p - 0.1%
Nokia E61 - 0.1%
Sony PlayStation Portable - 0.1%
Nokia N73 - 0.1%
Nokia N81 - 0.1%
Nokia N78 - 0.0%
Nokia 6120 classic - 0.0%
Nokia E65 - 0.0%
Danger Sidekick III - 0.0%
Motorola RAZR2 V8 - 0.0%
Samsung SCH-U940 - 0.0%
Motorola Q9 - 0.0%
Sony Ericsson P1i - 0.0%
It doesn't surprise me that Apple is driving most of this traffic; we know from AT&T that the iPhone is driving the vast majority of mobile Internet usage. But I would have thought that Apple's dominance would have been somewhat lower with Engadget's tech-savvy crowd, who are far more likely to have tried surfing from the other devices on the list than most people. It will be interesting to see just how much the iPhone rules mobile traffic as more mainstream sites share their data.
Posted by: Peter Burrows on August 20
It was certainly a schizophrenic kind of day yesterday, when it comes to Apple's rep for taking care of customers. On the one hand, the drumbeat of complaints about the performance of the iPhone 3G grew louder, as iPhone firmware update 2.0.2 failed to solve the problems for some customers . If you think Apple is getting unfairly bashed now, I'd get out your ear-plugs--especially since more people are suddenly sharing their personal worries about what they perceive to be falling quality levels from Apple. Here's what Michael Arrington at TechCrunch had to say.
And yet there was longer-term evidence that totally contradicts all this negative news-specifically, that Apple is doing a far better job of taking care of Mac users than any other PC company. Apple's score on the quarterly American Customer Satisfaction Index, run out of the University of Michigan by professor Claes Fornell, shows Apple soared to a score of 85 on the 100-point scale, from 79 the year before. That's the highest score ever recorded by a computer company, and a full ten points higher than nearest competitor Dell. "We've never seen anything like this," says Fornell. "Apple surged from already being the leader to opening up an incredible gap." He says he can't remember any instance of a company increasing its lead so dramatically (the ACSI survey also covers 41 other categories, from automobiles to broadcast news to energy utilities.)
Fornell suggests that Apple's high customer sat score on the Mac is not completely tied to customer support. "Apple is not known for superior customer service, but they seem to have some sort of teflon. Their styling and their products are just so strong." He didn't say the words, but I'd credit the Fanboy Effect. No company has more passionate defenders that are willing to overlook the company's imperfections. Come on, be honest--you know who you are. That's got to skew Apple's score up a bit.
Nonetheless, ACSI's data is an important reminder of Apple's basic nature, as the iPhone 3G kerfuffle dominates headlines. When people have a problem with a pricey, highly-hyped product like the iPhone 3G, they are bound to be angry. But one way or another, Apple will resolve the issue. It may take too long, and it may be inconvenient (Let's pray it doesn't involve a recall). But Apple has never simply dropped the ball on customers, that I can think of. Whatever it ultimately costs, Apple will do what it takes to solve the problems or at least make customers feel like they weren't ripped off too badly (let me know if you disagree).
That's smart, because the trust and good-will Apple has earned from its customers over the years is one of its greatest assets. I don't know how to put a number on it, but it's worth billions out of Apple's $155.65 billion market cap--which, if you hadn't notice, is higher than Google, the other huge gainer on the ACSI report (Google is currently worth $154.78 billion).
Posted by: Peter Burrows on August 18
So far, 144 readers have responded to our story on Dell’s plans to get back into digital entertainment, with software to make it easier to buy, share and play digital content. Unless I missed it, not a single one of these people thinks Dell has a prayer of succeeding. Trust me, I understand the skepticism. Compared to Apple, Dell stands for dull. Dell does distribution, not innovation.
But I still say Dell is worth watching—if only because it’s at least trying a new approach to create viable competition for Apple. Ever since the “Plays For Sure” initiative died the death it richly deserved and Microsoft turned to the more closed Zune approach, there has been no center of gravity to pull together the fragmented efforts taking place outside of Cupertino. Most digital media fans have an iPod, so can’t use most of the other commercial services that compete with iTunes. And people who have spent meaningful money at the iTunes store are unlikely to try out other devices. I am not saying Apple is anti-competitive or evil. But let’s face it: it's hard to see how any company by its lonesome can overcome the dominant position Apple has established, at least in digital music.
This helps explain why so many companies with worthy offerings are struggling financially. Take Pandora, a popular Internet radio site where anyone can create their own personalized stations. The company founder has told the Washington Post it may go out of business. While Apple certainly isn’t to blame—ridiculously high royalty rates for Internet radio stations are the culprit—Pandora would be doing better if its service had run on iPods for the past five years, as it now does on the iPhone and iPod Touch. This lack of healthy competitors isn’t good for consumers. Apple is the best there is if you want to play MP3s, rip music from your CDs or buy from a download store a la iTunes. But there are other ways to get—and more importantly, to discover—music these days, such as streaming services, ad-supported social networking sites and satellite radio. If Dell somehow succeeds in making its Zing software into a kind of lingua franca that enhances these services and the devices they run on, more people would give them a chance.
Continue reading "A Closer Look at Dell's Digital Entertainment Ambitions"
Posted by: Peter Burrows on August 14
Ever since Apple's board implicated "two former officers" in the options backdating scandal in late 2006, conventional wisdom has been that the company had thrown former general counsel Nancy Heinen and former CFO Fred Anderson under the bus. While the board found plenty of backdating, it exonerated CEO Steve Jobs and pointed the finger at them.
Wasn't much of a bus, it turns out. Today, Heinen settled year-old charges from the SEC for essentially $200,000--a few quarters' salary for a top executive at Apple. Sure, she had to repay the $1.5 million from the ill-gotten gains on the backdated options, plus $400,000 in interest, but of course she was going to have to give those back. The $200,000 is the fine for her purported crimes, which included having staffers draw up documents for a board meeting that never happened.
She got a slightly firmer slap on the wrist than Anderson. His fine was $150,000, and he did not get the ban on serving as an officer for a public company that is typical in such settlements. Heinen can't join a board or be general counsel for another corporation for five years.
Continue reading "A Nice Tidy End To The Options Backdating Scandal"
