Tim Cook - Time’s Almost Person of the Year

Time had nominated Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO as a candidate for the Person of the Year. Will Cook be able to make Apple come out with another revolutionary product, revealing to us what Steve Jobs saw in Cook. In any case, here is how Cook was recruited by Jobs to Apple.

Almost immediately after he arrived at Compaq, Cook began to get calls from Apple’s headhunters. Jobs was back from exile — he was pushed out from Apple in 1985, then rehired 12 years later — and he wanted to bring in somebody new to run operations. At that point Apple was generally considered to be in a death spiral — that year alone, it lost a billion dollars — and Cook had no interest whatsoever in moving. But Jobs was a legend in the industry, so Cook sat down with him one Saturday morning in Palo Alto. “I was curious to meet him,” Cook says. “We started to talk, and, I swear, five minutes into the conversation I’m thinking, I want to do this. And it was a very bizarre thing, because I literally would have placed the odds on that near zero, probably at zero.”

Cook was interested in Jobs’ strategy, which he describes using a favorite Cook expression, doubling down: “It was the polar opposite of everyone else’s. He was doubling down on consumer when everybody else was going into enterprise. And I thought it was genius. Compaq was doing so poorly in consumer, didn’t have a clue how to do consumer. IBM had left. Everybody was kind of concluding that consumer business is a loser, and here Steve is betting the company on it.”

 

Full Story on Time.com

Executive Reshuffle at Apple: Scott Forstall is out

Tim Cook take his first major step of reshaping the top executive ranks at Apple. It appears that a battle was brewing within Apple for some time about key design philosophies. Scott Forstall, who apparently has been branded as not being a team players, stumbled of the debacle with the Apple maps.

Read the detailed stories in LA Times and NY Times

Why Apple wanted to wave its own Maps Application and dumped Google’s prematurely

Yesterday the Apple CEO apologized for Apple’s crummy maps application in iOS 6. The WSJ reports on the financial reason why Apple wanted to dump Google maps.

Maps are a big piece of the Apple-Google rivalry. Opus Research has estimated that mobile ads associated with maps or locations account for about 25% of the roughly $2.5 billion spent on ads in mobile devices in 2012. Google has had mapping software since 2005, and a Google Maps app was pre-installed on the first iPhone starting in 2007. Apple only began building its maps software in 2009 under Mr. Jobs, with an eye toward making its version the default mapping app on the iPhone and, later, the iPad. Apple acquired several companies to construct its mapping technology, as well as using information from third parties, such as navigation system maker Tom Tom NV, before it was ready to boot Google Maps.

Source: WSJ.com

More Details on how Apple invented the iPhone

Slate reports:

This is the story of how Apple reinvented the phone. The general outlines of this tale have been told before, most thoroughly in Isaacson’s biography. But the Samsung case—which ended last month with a resounding victory for Apple—revealed a trove of details about the invention, the sort of details that Apple is ordinarily loath to make public. We got pictures of dozens of prototypes of the iPhone and iPad. We got internal email that explained how executives and designers solved key problems in the iPhone’s design. We got testimony from Apple’s top brass explaining why the iPhone was a gamble.
Put it all together and you get remarkable story about a device that, under the normal rules of business, should not have been invented. Given the popularity of the iPod and its centrality to Apple’s bottom line, Apple should have been the last company on the planet to try to build something whose explicit purpose was to kill music players. Yet Apple’s inner circle knew that one day, a phone maker would solve the interface problem, creating a universal device that could make calls, play music and videos, and do everything else, too—a device that would eat the iPod’s lunch. Apple’s only chance at staving off that future was to invent the iPod killer itself. More than this simple business calculation, though, Apple’s brass saw the phone as an opportunity for real innovation. “We wanted to build a phone for ourselves,” Scott Forstall, who heads the team that built the phone’s operating system, said at the trial. “We wanted to build a phone that we loved.”

Full story on Slate

Apple vs. Samsung Trial Reveals a lot of data on the firms’ stratetigies

Ina Fried of the WSJ’s All Things Digital is following the Apple-Samsung Trial and is providing an analysis of all the information the typically secretive Apple is forced to reveal.

Apple vs. Samsung Trial Forces Companies to Open Up the Books

At the bottom of the article are links to her other commentaries on the trial.

Tim Cook Interview at DX: Following Steve Jobs

Tim Cook was interviewed about a range of topics at DX, including Steve Jobs.

Jobs Was an Awesome Flip-Flopper, Says Tim Cook (Video)

Here is a summary on the remarks on Steve Jobs leadership style.

6:33 pm: Walt: How is Apple different with you as the CEO?
“I learned a lot from Steve. It was absolutely the saddest day of my life when he passed away.”
“At some point late last year, I sort of — somebody kind of shook me and said, ‘It’s time to get on.’” That sadness was replaced by his intense determination to continue the journey.

6:34 pm: What did I learn from him? Focus.
“You can only do so many things great, and you should cast aside everything else.”
Cook says that not accepting things good or very good, but only the best, “that’s embedded in Apple.”
“I’m not going to witness or permit the change of that.”
“He also taught me the joy is in the journey, and that was a revelation for me.”
Cook also made a reference to the fact that Jobs stressed the importance of owning the key underlying technologies.
As for moving on, Cook says: “I love museums, but I don’t want to live in one.”

6:37 pm: Cook says he is committed to preserving the culture of Apple.
“It is not that easy to duplicate, either,” Cook says.
“If they could, everybody would be like this,” Cook says. “You can’t get a consultant report” and change to be like Apple.

 

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Department of Justice Files Suit Against Apple and Major Publishers of ebooks

Apple did not join the settlement of the lawsuit. This is a major win for Amazon. It will be fascinating to watch how the suit will unfold.

Details:
Apple should settle suit
Associated Press on Suit April 11

 

Reversal of Fortunes: In smartphones Microsoft is in the position that Apple was in the PC era

The New York Times reports on this amazing reversal of fortunes.

Microsoft’s weak position in mobile apps is in stark contrast to the clout it had with developers in the heyday of the PC era. Its success with Windows was partly built on an all-out effort it made in the 1980s and ’90s to get independent software companies to make Windows the primary operating system for which they wrote applications.That influence began to weaken somewhat when the Web era took off and more companies began to design services and products that ran through browsers. But it has accelerated further as much of the creative talent in the developer world has shifted toward smartphone and iPad applications. Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst at Forrester Research, said Microsoft’s relative weakness was a function of not having a big enough audience of users. “Developers go where the money is, and the money is where people are,” she said.

Full Article at NY Times

Vertical Integration Works for Apple—But It Won?t for Everyone

Wharton professors explain why Apple integrated model of designing both hardware and software may not work for other companies. Knowledge@Wharton reports:

Google recently acquired mobile device maker Motorola Mobility and will soon manufacture smartphones and television set-top boxes. Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet represents its bridge between hardware and e-commerce. Oracle bought Sun Microsystems and now champions engineered systems (integrated hardware and software devices). And even long-standing software giant Microsoft now makes hardware for its Xbox gaming system. Technology titans are increasingly looking like vertically integrated conglomerates largely in an attempt to emulate the success of Apple.Vertical integration dictates that one company controls the end product as well as its component parts. In technology, Apple for 35 years has championed a vertical model, which features an integrated hardware and software approach. For instance, the iPhone and iPad have hardware and software designed by Apple, which also designed its own processors for the devices. This integration has allowed Apple to set the pace for mobile computing. “Despite the benefits of specialization, it can make sense to have everything under one roof,” says Wharton management professor David Hsu.

Read full story.

1985 Steve Jobs is fired, Bill Gates sends letter to John Sculley urging him to license Mac OS

Neal Pancholi drew my attention to this interesting letter by Bill Gates. It shows that Gates in 1985 was sill open to making his fortune my selling Mac software rather than dominating the next generation OS.

To: John Sculley, Jean Louis Gassée
From: Bill Gates, Jeff Raikes
Date: June 25, 1985
Re: Apple Licensing of Mac Technology

cc: Jon Shirley

Background

Apple’s stated position in personal computers is innovative technology leader. This position implies that Apple must create a standard on new, advanced technology. They must establish a “revolutionary” architecture, which necessarily implies new development incompatible with existing architectures.

Apple must make Macintosh a standard. But no personal computer company, not even IBM, can create a standard without independent support. Even though Apple realized this, they have not been able to gain the independent support required to be perceived as a standard.

 

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