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Steve Jobs' Grand Vision
ejungle writes "The Toronto Star has an excellent article on Steve Jobs and his increasingly interesting role as head of both Apple Computer and Pixar Animation Studios. The article goes into the market pressures surrounding both companies, and goes a long way to explain their recent moves."
Steve Jobs DOES have vision, and a profound understanding of the principles of technological innovation, no matter what some people might think. For example, he wrote that famous text himself: http://www.apple.com/thinkdifferent/
Best Buy can have you arrested
On Intel Xeons, noless. That said, they built it signficantly before the G5 Desktop and the G5 XServe were available. No offense, but much as I want a G5 and like the look-and-feel of Mac OS X, you have to admit that a bunch of overheating 1GHz G4's were significantly less cost effective than a similar bunch of P4 Xeons at the time the render farm was built.
The article fails to mention that Jobs can also play an increasingly large role in the proposed Disney/Comcast merger. Comcast's CEO, Brian Roberts, is trying to pursuade Steve Jobs to join ranks with Comcast. Since Pixar has been directly responsible for a very large portion of Disney's recent success, and since Pixar will be severing ties with Disney, if Steve Jobs endorses the merger and decides to renew the contract with Disney (because of the Comcast deal), stockholders will be significantly more inclined to approve the merger.
the market share thing is really strange... I keep seeing more and more and more macs out there (especially powerbooks).. most of the linux market share has to be in servers. I'm at RIT and I think about half the people I see now have apple laptops, its really insane. even the members of the Computer Science House (special interest housing) about half have mac laptops, despite most also having desktops running windows or linux or windows and linux.. Apple's market share definitely is not decreasing at least.
If the big bad cable company trying to take you over wants content, killing value by dropping an agreement with a major content provider (Pixar) might just be the way to go.
Anyone else think Eisner would do that to fend off Comcast and keep the keys to the Kingdom to himself?
No, if anything I think it was done by Steve to force Eisner out. Disney loses Pixar, Roy Disney is up in arms about Eisner ruining Disney ( savedisney.com ), and an election of the CEO coming up. Roy says that Eisner is killing Disney and Pixar leaves then board votes. With two films left to go, it seems early for a splitting of the ways (perhaps not as I don't know what they have planned or how long it takes to put it out). We'll see if Eisner gets the boot by shareholders and if Disney and Pixar kiss and make up afterwards.
What are Steve's plans for Apple? I think he's stickign with the killer app theory and moving into various nitches. He doesn't have to be the best computer all round. he simply has to be the best computer for graphics and video. IF apple puts out the best, that's what people will buy. An extra thousand or so really doesn't matter when it can save you ten thousand in time. Combined with the video apps that Apple has bought and is now making, this seems a the way it's going. The Xserve seems made from day one for cheap render farms. It doesn't matter what Apple's market share is because if Apple can just maintain these two markets, there's plenty of money to keep a computer company afloat.
From there, it's just a matter of picking another niche and moving into it. They've got some with the ease of use home segment using OS X as a killer app and at the same time sucking in *nix people in the laptops.
Music seems the next killer app they're moving into. They've bought and are producing apps for music production. They bought Emagic and Logic and have put out music apps from Garageband on up. Eventually they'll be the standard in music as they are in video (and already are depending on who you ask).
What will Apple do next? Who knows. Look to see what Apple buys next because the problem hasn't been that Apple didn't license out clones but that Apple stopped publishing their own apps. People will use what ever computer does the job. What computer does the job is dependant on the Killer App. From now on, I expect Apple to make both the computer and the Killer App.