By John Gruber
Mux — Video for developers
Linked List: October 22, 2008
Wednesday, 22 October 2008
- Apple Hires Dean of Yale’s Business School for ‘Apple University’ ★
-
Yukari Iwatani Kane, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:
Apple Inc. is hiring the dean of Yale University’s business school to start a project that it calls Apple University.
The Cupertino, Calif., computer maker said Joel Podolny, the dean of the Yale School of Management, will join Apple as vice president and dean of Apple University. The company declined to provide details about the university or the position.
I’m all ears if anyone out there knows what this means.
- Handshake 1.0 ★
-
New free iPhone app lets you exchange contact cards over the air with other Handshake users. Should be a built-in iPhone feature.
- Wrong ★
-
Henry Blodget:
Steve and Apple need to find a clear, strong No. 2 soon, and then Steve needs to start sharing the stage with him or her. This person can come from within Apple or outside of it, but investors need to know who it is. The sooner the better.
Two takes on this:
The last time Apple tried this was when they brought John Sculley in as CEO. And then he turned around and engineered a boardroom coup to kick Jobs out of the company. So don’t hold your breath waiting for Jobs to establish a “clear, strong No. 2”.
Tim Cook has been Apple’s “clear, strong No. 2” for years. When Jobs was out of commission for his cancer surgery in 2004, he handed the reins of the company over to Cook.
My vote goes for #2.
- MacDailyNews’s Compendium of iPhone Naysayers ★
-
Quite a list.
- ‘No Chance’ ★
-
Steve Ballmer on the iPhone’s prospects, back in April 2007:
There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money.
Well, he was right about the “may make a lot of money” part.
- ‘No Likelihood’ ★
-
John C. Dvorak, calling for Apple to abandon the iPhone in March 2007:
The problem here is that while Apple can play the fashion game as well as any company, there is no evidence that it can play it fast enough. These phones go in and out of style so fast that unless Apple has half a dozen variants in the pipeline, its phone, even if immediately successful, will be passé within 3 months.
There is no likelihood that Apple can be successful in a business this competitive.
- Steve Jobs’s Home Run With the iPhone ★
-
Saul Hansell gets it:
Apple generates so much hype and gratuitous superlatives that it can be hard to distinguish when it has done something that is truly remarkable. But going over what Apple said in its earnings release and conference call Tuesday, it’s clear that the dimensions of its cellphone business — its sales, profits and market share — deserve the strongest words of praise that can be summoned.
- John McCain, Eight Years Ago, on Negative Attack Ads ★
-
Sounds exactly right to me.
- Pixish Closing October 31 ★
-
Sometimes good ideas don’t work out.
- We’re All Lucky Scott McNealy Is a Tightwad ★
-
1996 NYT article about Sun’s lowball bid to buy Apple Computer. How things have changed since then: Apple today could make a lowball bid to buy Sun Microsystems using just the cash they’ve earned in the last six months.
- Why the iPhone Is Now Apple’s Most Important Product ★
-
Good piece from Tom Krazit. This breakdown of iPhone revenue divided by units is interesting:
It allows us to make imperfect estimates on just how much Apple is receiving in subsidies on each iPhone 3G. $4.6 billion in revenue divided by 6.9 million units equals $666.67 per iPhone. That’s a little high, since some portion of that revenue has to be attached to Apple TV sales, but even making the unlikely assumption that Apple sold $500 million worth of a product it calls a “hobby” during the fourth quarter puts the average cost of an iPhone 3G at $594.20.
- Claim Chowder Time for Richard Sprague ★
-
Richard Sprague, a senior marketing director at Microsoft, back in January 2007:
I can’t believe the hype being given to iPhone. Even some of my blindly-loyal pro-Microsoft friends and colleagues talk like it’s a real innovation and will “redefine the market” or “usher in a new age”.
What!?!? [...] I just have to wonder who will want one of these things (other than the religious faithful). People need this to be a phone, first and foremost. But with 5 hours of battery life? No keypad? (you try typing a phone number on that screen, no matter how wonderful it is — you will want a keypad). And for all that whiz-bang Internet access, you absolutely need the phone to work, immediately, every single time. Will it do that?
So please mark this post and come back in two years to see the results of my prediction: I predict they will not sell anywhere near the 10M Jobs predicts for 2008.
I bookmarked it and I’m back to see the results.