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Behind a Steve Jobs Keynote
Shree writes "The Guardian has an article about what it takes to prepare that smooth Steve Jobs-style keynote. When Steve launches iPhoto and says 'here we have 5000 or so photos', he actually means here we have 5000 or so carefully picked photos ... " From the article: "Objectively, Apple Computer is a mid-sized company with a tiny share of its primary market. Apple Macintoshes are only rarely seen in corporate environments, and most software companies don't even offer Apple-compatible versions of their products. To put it another way, Apple is just bit larger than Cadbury-Schweppes and about the same size as Nike or Marks and Spencer in terms of annual sales. Such comparisons come up short in trying to describe Apple's place in the world of business, because they leave out a key factor: Steve Jobs."
are completely different.
"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."--Howard Zinn
In a highly complicated world with new technology popping up daily, Steve Jobs does a great job at simplifying things to make an outstanding and lasting impression. The image of Apple is depicted perfectly in every one of Jobs' keynotes, down to the last little detail Steve makes sure everything is perfect.
/whisper/ Thanks for the candy!
honestly a steve jobs' show is as exciting as an episode of Desperate Housewives (though no cleavage is involved) - it's not the dull drone of a corporate talk. it's quite fun to watch and i regularly watch all of his addresses - can't wait for his MacExpo keynote! no wonder a lot of work goes into it - who can forget the priceless moment where he pulled out the ipod nano out of his coin pocket in his jeans!that's good stuff...
My sig has been answered.
I got news for you. The problems Apple had were not introduced by Gil Amelio. Amelio kept Apple alive during his tenure. If Amelio hadn't been there, there would be no Apple for Jobs to come back to. Furthermore, it was under Amelio that Apple bought NeXT (or as some wags would have it, NeXT bought Apple for negative $400 million), paving the way for Jobs to retake the helm.
No, if you want to blame Apple's problems on anyone, it should be Spindler and Sculley.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Apple Macintoshes are only rarely seen in corporate environments
I wonder if that is starting to shift at all? I know from my own experience, our company is about 32 people or so, and I can count 10 or 11 Mac users. Not one of them is involved whatsoever in graphics or design. Most are developers, but the Sysadmin, CEO, COO, and VP of Product Development all use Macs, and the VP of Sales is a Mac user at home, but chooses a Win laptop just for compatibility sake when she's onsite @ client's offices.
Roughly 30% of our company is Mac. And barely any support is ever needed for any of them.
NeXT was the basis for OSX.
But I've never been a CEO and I haven't studied Apple. I'm a little reluctant to believe that any one person can really be credited with stuff as diverse as the iPod, Final Cut Pro, the Mac Mini, etc and still have time to run around making speeches all the time.
Jobs is extremely involved in the day to day design of the products. He has final say on everything.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X
Despite its branding as simply "version 10" of the Mac OS, it has a history largely independent of the earlier Mac OS releases. It is based on the Mach kernel and the BSD implementation of Unix, which were incorporated into NEXTSTEP, the object-oriented operating system developed by Steve Jobs's NeXT company after he was forced from Apple in 1985. Meanwhile, Apple attempted to create a "next generation" operating system of its own (see Taligent and Copland), but with little success. Eventually, NeXT's OS--by then called OPENSTEP--was selected to form the basis for Apple's next OS, and the company purchased NeXT outright. Jobs was rehired, and later returned to the leadership of the company, shepherding the transformation of the programmer-friendly OPENSTEP into a system that would be welcomed by Apple's primary market of home users and creative professionals, as a project known as Rhapsody. After some missteps which threatened the loyalty of independent developers to Mac OS, and changes of strategy to ease the transition from Mac OS 9 to the new system, Rhapsody evolved into Mac OS X.
I'd say that Steve Jobs WAS right in predicting the future. Many elements of Mac OS X are derived from the operating system developed at NeXT. Supposedly the next version of Windows takes many cues from the current Mac OS X.
Uh, maybe you and I are thinking about different Rio 500s. My Rio lasted about two weeks before a solder joint internally that connected the battery to the rest of the unit broke. When I opened it to fix it I realized that the idiots had soldered a think stranded wire directly to a metal plate as opposed to running it through something or mounting it in any way shape or form. After applying some flux to actually make it stick, it lasted for a few months before the thing just *stopped* playing MP3s.
If that's what you mean by 'indestructable', I'm thinking that 'indestructable' doesn't mean what you think it means.
In all rights, however, I could have just had a lemon Rio. Doesn't mean that the design wasn't shoddy, just that mine was particularly shoddy. Thank god I got it for free.
To the darkened skies once more, and ever onward.
They forgot the most important things -- the Levis blue jeans and Gap black turtleneck sponsorships.
FWIW, Steve Jobs does not shop at the GAP -- he normally wears Issey Miyake black turtlenecks. It's BIG $$$ designer wear that just happens to look like something you can much cheaper. And if you have the $$$, you can wear it without giving an air of pretension because only those in the know will have any idea that you spent that much on your clothes.
Issey Miyake is a fashion designer whose cologne for men (L'eau D'Issey) seems a lot more common (not to mention a lot more affordable) than his clothing.
> Steve Jobs doesn't do anything that anyone else in his position
> wouldn't do.
Um. Huh?
> This isn't to say Steve Jobs doesn't deserve credit for being
> good at what he does, but I don't think he's particularly unique
> in his approach or methods.
Again: huh?
Steve has been described in lots of different ways. "Not unique" is not among them.
It's absolutely true that there's quite a bit of mythology around Steve, and much of it is overblown. None of this suggests that he is simply another Bill Gates copycat.
Now Bill: I suspect Bill is just doing what anybody else in his position would do. Survival by crushing all others. This is, sadly, how large publicly traded businesses are designed to work.
And Paris Hilton is some kind of sensation? I'd call her a whore.
Only in movies, not in live theater (which this is). In live theater if you try to adlib you are quickly dropped (actors usually memorize the ends of lines of others to know when to give their line, so if someone adlibs it can throw the other actors off). If Steve had multiple takes I'm sure he would do the same as the movie actors you cite.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
Most of the quarterly numbers come from IDC and/or Gartner Group, research companies which specializes in compiling such figures.
0 0.asp
For instance, here's the 3rd quarter 2005 figures:
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,123213,
Note that the figures quoted may be a bit off from the numbers in the charts I linked to, because of error corrections which were made after the article posted, rounding errors, etc.
Apple's own official figures can be found in the Investor Relations section of their website:
http://www.apple.com/investor/
The average Asian OEM PC maker sells more computers then Apple. The average Asian OEM maker also makes and sells more computers than Dell, HP, IBM, Gateway and your mother, assclown, because they are also the ones that make the computers for dell, HP, Gateway and your mother.
Dumbass.
How to be modded "5+ Insightful"
Begin by spouting lots of drivel that is pointless, meaningless nonsense. Draw a widely inaccurate troll-like conclusion from said drivel and conclude with "Of course I will be modded down..."
Slashdotters far and wide will assume your incompetence is brilliance and your quest for mod points as a sign of your freewilling don't-give-a-damn attitude. Watch them mod points roll in!
Damnit it's called reverse psychology! Why do slashdotters fall for this every time?
Not that I am calling out the parent alone on this. I am just sick of the phrase "Of course I will be modded down..." on the end of every semi-confrontational post.
It has been reported that Steve Jobs decides the order of the applications in the Dock when a new machine cold boots. Of course, someone must decide the order of these apps. The significance is that the CEO considers it important enough to have a hand in it.
Not so disconnected, I think.
Standing on the shoulders of giants.
Gates, Jobs, and the Zen Aesthetic looks at what makes Jobs' presentations so effective, contrasting with the dismal style that comes out of Microsoft.
Regardless of what you think of the products they are selling, or the cult of personality around Steve Jobs, I would recommend this article to anyone that ever has or ever will sit in front of PowerPoint or Keynote or Impress or who will give any presentation of any kind. The contrast is so sharp that I think everyone can learn something from it.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.