Slashdot Mirror
Al Gore Joins Apple's Board Of Directors
zzxc writes "News.com.com reports that Al Gore has been chosen to be on Apple's board of directors. Apple has a press release with more information. According to the press release, 'Al brings an incredible wealth of knowledge and wisdom to Apple from having helped run the largest organization in the world--the United States government' and 'He has remained an active leader in technology--launching a public/private effort to wire every classroom and library in America to the Internet.' The inventor of the internet should be a valuable asset to Apple."
Just in!
Gore invents AppleTalk
Gore invents candy-colored computer
Gore invents small music player
Gore invents fast new web browser
Gore invents XUL (Hyatt mysteriously fired)
Gore invents new GUI for BSD
During a March 1999 CNN interview, while trying to differentiate himself from rival Bill Bradley, Gore boasted: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. ... The terrible irony in this exchange is that while Gore certainly didn't create the Internet, he was one of the first politicians to realize that those bearded, bespectacled researchers were busy crafting something that could, just maybe, become pretty important." - Wired News
Al Gore never claimed he invented the internet, and anyone who jokes about it is just showing their ignorance. (sorry timothy)
Kallahar
he didn't say he'd invented the internet.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
Beats another lawyer....
These are the directors of Apple:
Bill Campbell
Chairman and former CEO
Intuit Corp.
Millard Drexler
Chairman and CEO
J. Crew
Albert Gore Jr.
Former Vice President of the United States
Steve Jobs
CEO, Apple
CEO, Pixar
Arthur D. Levinson, Ph. D.
Chairman and CEO
Genentech
Jerry York
President and CEO
Micro Warehouse
Where are the lawyers? I don't understand your statement. And what would be wrong with having lawyer on the BOD (assuming conflicts of interest don't exist)?
The actual quote is "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
I wouldn't get your panties so bunched up about Al Gore and the DMCA. Remember that it was Gore and the Clinton administration that tried to break up Microsoft. (Unlike the current admin that just decided they will no longer enforce anti-trust laws.) Gore clearly has a pro-technology and pro-technology-choice bent. Al Gore may be able to do a lot for Apple. He certainly has a lot of connections. This could be a really smart move on Apple's part.
Interesting side note, President Clinton and Jobs were pretty tight, while Michael Dell was a big supporter of Dubya. I think that says a lot...
"The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." Albert Camus,
1. Al Gore knows business. I doubt it. His only job since college that wasnt government was as a reporter for a local newspaper. And that was for a brief time.
He has been instrumental in getting business and government to cooperate in wiring classrooms nationwide, and is currently a senior advisor for Google, Inc.
2. Al Gore knows/is academic[a]. I doubt it. He isn't particularly well educated by any standards. He is college educated, which is something for sure. He is presumably very bright, but as somewhat who has meet him and had some conversation with him, he came off as kinda dim. Not GWBush dim, but clearly not razor sharp.
I can't claim to have talked with him personally, but I have read his writings, speeches etc... and he comes off pretty bright to this person with 13 or so years of post high-school education. And from the press release: "He is also a visiting professor at the University of California Los Angeles, Fisk University and Middle Tennessee State University. Mr. Gore received his B.A. in Government with honors from Harvard University in 1969, and attended the Vanderbilt University School of Religion and the Vanderbilt University School of Law." I would say this qualifies.
3. Al Gore is not an Apple insider.
That is good. But on the other hand, he isn't likely to be able to affect much of how Apple operates because of that same reason.
Where is you logic here? This is a totally bogus and biased statement with no evidence to back it up.
4. Al Gore knows government. True, but he knew the last government. That's a problem. He knew a lot of key decisons makers and might have been able to leverage those. Now there is a new government, and many decisions of scale and size are made by political apointee's and their sub-ordinates. This means he in fact has very little leverage for Apple now that GWBush is in office.
Again, from the press release: "He served for a total of eight years as President of the Senate, a member of the cabinet and the National Security Council, and as the leader of a wide range of Administration initiatives including environmental policy, technology, science, communications and government cost reduction."
You can't possibly have this level of experience and not be able to navigate government past and present. In fact, in my personal experience, having even a little degree of connection with government does wonders for ones business. Al Gore has most folks trumped here by a long shot.
But seriously, this is interesting but not really all that good for Apple, in my opinion. He is a controversial, and turns alot of people of (about 49% of voters at last count).
Well, that is an opinion and as for your percentage (matching that of the last election), the majority of folks like him.
That's not a good quality for a company who is very image focused. Even if only 1 in 1000 people hate him enough to not buy Apple products, will it outweigh the number of people who will buy Apple products because they like him? Probably not.
Gee, let's see, Apple is doing quite well with 4-5% of the personal computer market. If they can appeal to at least the majority of the U.S. population, that can only be a good thing for the company.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Ask him, very specifically, about Apple's DRM stance.
"You've just recently been added to Apple's board of directors. What are your feeling towards Apple's customer-friendly, honesty-based stance on Digital Rights Management?"
-/-
Mikey-San
Submitted without a karma bonus for extra flavour!
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
If by "flunked out of college" you meant "graduated cum laude from Harvard (1969), then from Vanderbilt Divinity School (1972), then from Vanderbilt Law School (1976)," you're absolutely right.
You tell me how "whilst" differs from "while," and I'll stop calling you a pretentious jackass.
When I think of Al Gore and Apple together, why do the words "Runner Up" keep coming to mind?
Ignoring your sarcastic temporal hair splitting around the word "invent" which Gore never said, I'll move on to:
"In 1976, Gore started his long and unbroken career as a politician. According to this empasioned defense [politechbot.com] Al Gore made his first concrete contribution to what we know of as the internet with, "High Performance Computing and Communications Act in 1991." Not bad, he beat Bill Gates to caring, but it's hardly the kind of stuff you could call "instrumental". "
Not Instrumental? That act provided much of the foundation for the Internet you use today. Hell, the provision for exposing more undergraduate students to the Internet probably did more to popularize the Internet than you can measure.
The HPCC represented the culmination of years of lobbying, explaining, and educating on Gore's part, but in addition to this, he helped privatize the Internet paving the way for pretty much everything the public would recognize. He was also an outspoken champion of technology in general, which is the point he was making.
I've met him several times, and he is by far the smartest politician I have EVER met. He could clean Newt Gingrich's clock with one frontal lobe tied behind his back.
I guess the most relevant meeting I ever had with him was in Nashville around 1995. I was part of an Internet startup, an ISP, and got to shake hands with him. He was there as a speaker and essentially a technology cheerleader. I thanked him for helping make our little company a reality.
This was years before the "invented the Internet" nonsense. Even then I credited him with being a visionary about it. He didn't see it as an academic problem, or a network between research institutions, or a defense project, or even a place to find 800 kinds of porn. He saw it as a tools for transforming society.
Read his 2000 Red Herring interview and prepare to be stunned.
-Sandy