Answers From Steve Jobs at Apple's Shareholder Meeting

DECS writes "At today's Apple annual shareholder meeting, a series of proposals were presented for voting after which CEO Steve Jobs answered a series of questions from the audience. Jobs talked about Greenpeace, stock options, the iPhone, Mac OS X Leopard, and .Mac."

Comments

Anyone notice a change in Jobs?

[falcon5768]

Like he's a new man all of a sudden? I mean yeah he had that cancer scare a year or two back, but like his attitude has changed. Its like he's not the same Jobs who stormed off MSNBC or CNN, or the same Jobs that people stayed away from when getting into elevators, cause you didnt know if you would have a job coming out of it.

He's almost jovial all of a sudden. Its frightening.

Nice of him to finally clear the air on the stock scandal and get the whole facts out there. Knowing the whole story now it really does look like what analysts where saying, a whole lot of nothing. Why the feds think they need to go after Apple of all companies when there a MUCH bigger fish to fry (*cough* hello big oil shutting down refineries for maintenance right after coming off of maintenance cycles to decrease production) who knows.

Also nice of him to again point out how stupid Greenpeace is. I quite enjoyed the maybe you should hire a few engineers so you can understand what the hell your talking about remark.

Re:Anyone notice a change in Jobs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in college when I was studying metallugical engineering, I tried to get involved with a couple of those organizations, not greenpeace specifically. But they were insane from the bottom up. I couldn't pass the idological litmus test, which pretty much involve calling day night. It a lot of ways they're the new religion.

Re:Anyone notice a change in Jobs?

[Nefarious Wheel]

He's never come across as clueless or insensitive to me, just very very focused. I remember in the early days of Apple he walked in to the Bandley 2 computer room (open fishbowl, secured by people knowing not to bother the ops) wearing T-shirt, jeans & sandals and started playing with the switches on one of the front panels of "Junior", the 11/70 we used for development.

Tim Fischer, the op at the time, threw him out. "Do you know who I am?" he said -- Tim responded "I don't care if you're f***ing Steve Jobs, get out of my computer room". Steve left and I believe TIm got a pay rise out of it, although he was a bit shook when he told me.

RSTS-E/Basic Plus -- everything you needed but address space...

Re:Anyone notice a change in Jobs?

[that this is not und]

Back then 'PeeCees' weren't used to develop their own software. The software was always cross-compiled/assembled on bigger machines.

Jobs on his salary:

[earthbound kid]

'I make fifty cents just for showing up, and the other 50 cents is based on my performance.'

Re:Jobs on his salary:

[GaryPatterson]

He may be a marketing genius, but he's also brought Apple from insignificance to centre-stage prominence, and the share prices reflect that.

I argue that all executives above a certain level should be on $1/year salary, with other money coming in based purely on performance. If the alternative (the current state) is huge bonuses on top of already huge salaries when the company is tanking and workers are getting shafted, then it'd be an improvement. It should also make executives focus on longer term success for a company.

Having said all that, the amount he was given by the board is excessively high.

forget about being "slightly better"

[nanosquid]

I don't know about Apple's overall corporate standing in terms of environment, and I don't think it matters that much. The fact is: computers are bad for the environment. The best thing you can do for the environment may be not to buy a new computer at all and keep using the old one. And the worst thing for the environment may ultimately be... the power hungry software upgrades that induce people to buy new hardware.

As for Apple, I wish they'd replace their styrofoam packaging with something recycled and biodegradable. Apple's packaging is like a throwback to the 70's.

Campaigning has cleaned up Ikea too

[Oldsmobile]

Even though campaigning like this is often viewed as obnoxious and the author of the article sure seemed to think so, it's motivated several big companies to clean up their act.

Case in point, Ikea, which is nowadays greener and more ethical than any number of small furniture retailers, even the mom-and-pop operations that probably sell the worst kind of child labour produced rainforest wood furniture there is.

This due to being vocal about the problems by that company and now it turns out that if you want to be an ethical shopper you have to shop at Ikea.

Re:do something with the cash!

[MECC]

Well, it has been going up lately, but MS stock outperformed it (click the Max zoom in the upper right hand area of the graph). A much better investment might be copper. I read an article years ago by an economic geologist (haven't found a link to it though) in which it was stated that at current known copper reserves, there isn't enough copper to wire the third world to the same extent the industrialized nations are wired (power and communications). Wireless may change that, but the third world still wants electricity, and China is building 544 new coal power plants in the foreseeable future. That's a lot of copper, and without some kind of gigantic new source, that's likely to mean higher copper prices in the future.

I'd advise apple to invest in either copper of MS stock.