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

Posted on Sep 10, 12

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.

Posted on Aug 11, 12

Institutional Environment and Evolutionary Dynamics

Dan Levinthal organized a workshop on Evolutionary Perspectives on Strategic Management. Dick Nelson and I faciliated the fourth day on Institutional Environment and Evolutionary Dynamics. Here you can download the syllabus for the day day and the presentation slides.

Syllabus
Presentation Slides

Posted on Jun 28, 12

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.

More...

Posted on Jun 13, 12

And then it is turtles all the way down…

From Wikipedia:
The origins of the turtle story are uncertain.
The most widely known version appears in Stephen Hawking’s 1988 book A Brief History of Time, which starts:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
—Hawking, 1988

More...

Posted on Jun 11, 12