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Steve Jobs Crowned "Person of the Decade"
longacre writes "Apple CEO Steve Jobs won over 30% of the vote in an online poll published by personal finance and investing news site SmartMoney.com, enough to earn their 'Person of the Decade' title by a solid margin over luminaries such as Warren Buffett (17%), Ben Bernanke (13%) and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page (12%). From the article: 'Certainly, Jobs accomplished more than probably any other CEO since he returned to Apple in the late 1990s: Not only did he revive sales at the failing computer company, he led the stock to a more than 700% increase in value, and forever changed the way people buy and listen to music.'"
I can't name anyone else who could have had more of an impact on the world than these two assholes.
Steve Jobs introduced some nice toys, but that's nothing compared to the impact of dismantling the American way or life.
Say what you want about the rampant fanboyism, the DRM, and the culture of "idea X is dumb and there's no reason for us to support it HEY CHECK OUT OUR NEW FEATURE WE CALL IT iX AND IT IS TOTALLY AWESOME AND UNIQUE BECAUSE IT'S WHITE!" that permeates apple, but there are probably very few of us that wouldn't want to take a time machine back to Dec 2000 and buy a few thousand shares of APPL at $7.50.
(Of course, you could always just get hired by Apple and back date your stock option.....i keed i keed....)
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Is this the right place to point out that the first decade of this century and millenium has one more year to go?
Any sequence of 10 years is a decade, I guess. So who was last year's person of the decade?
If influencing the highest number of people in the world is the main factor in the poll, then I agree with it. A lot of people from some countries could care less about what is happening in other countries, but everyone in the world wants an iPod or iPhone! As sad as that is, it has directly affected culture everywhere. Now, I wish the poll would reference the masterminds behind Steve Jobs like Steve "Evil-Eye" Bertrand, or many others who have rallied behind Steve Jobs to make one of the most powerful companies of the decade. The iPod has influenced culture everywhere, where significant events mainly affect the nations involved. Since it is a finance poll, I'd say it would be the number of people in their market share.
Wow He's really a good choice. I brought an iphone an year ago and now I'm so addicted that I just can't live without it. 700% increase is a lot, great job Steve..
http://www.janilink.com/
It came down to one thing: the iPod caused the revivial of Apple. It led to the iPhone and gave them the financial resources to improve OS X.
So, what person, or team of people are responsible for making the iPod happen (for all I know maybe that was Steve Jobs)? Shouldn't they be getting all of the accolades now?
I love how our culture writes off if a person is an asshat or not so long as he's successful. I guess we even expect the behavior.
Is a man a good father, good husband? Is he a positive influence on the people around him in his life? Is he happy and fulfilled? Who cares, as long as the stock options go up.
...how certain people (dare we guess what OS they use? Could possible THEY be fanboys as well?!) INSTANTLY tag this "fanboi" etc. when the vote comes from the economy sector. It seems there is no end to the pityful behavior of the tiny minds of the /. grannies. Shoo, shoo! Crawl back under your stones, you hate-sick critters!
"...From the article, 'Certainly, Jobs accomplished more than probably any other CEO since he returned to Apple in the late 1990s:
So? What did he do in the LAST decade? Shouldn't that be what matters?
... and forever changed the way people buy and listen to music.
Really? I don't have an iPod. More Americans don't than do. What did he do exactly that change the way we listen to music? MP3 players were already coming into prominence. Perhaps he accelerated it, but he didn't change the way we do it.
Oh yea, he created the iTunes. Yup, he did indeed singlehandedly come up with a way to purchase music online, to put DRM into it, and was the first to do so. /end sarcasm.
If anything, he did convince many companies to forgo DRM, and for that, I do give him credit for. So in that way, he did change the way we listen to music.
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
Not to mention his appearances on 'Dancing With the Stars'
Oh wait, wrong Steve.
Never mind
Steve Jobs is the farmer and the current generation of fancy-clothed-hip-young-lifestyle people are his sheep.
i SERIOUSLY do not get what is so great about Apple products. All they do is take a pre-existing product, add gloss and make it look nice and the sheep come pouring in. What a stupid time we live in, Idiocracy is not far away.
BTW I'm not a M$ fan-boy, but I would take aMicrosoft product (or Linux) over Apple any day. Practicality over aesthetics I say.
Didn't the last decade contain Google's entire rise to dominance? The "start page to the internet" and all that? How exactly does Apple's crappy e-store compare with that achievement, exactly? One has to think that the results of the poll are about flash rather than true impact.
at the FreeBSD foundation and those among us that helped improve OS X's source via the OpenDarwin project. (And then Steve Jobs gets credit? Not in my book...)
Too dang bad Apple had to put it (the OpenDarwin project) down. As if over 90% of the kernel didn't come from the open source community...
Those guys/gals who did all that code and testing are the ones who really deserve to take a bow...
Oh, yeah, congrats Mr. Jobs.
Good job giving no credit to the grunts toiling for your profit margin...
Sorry to be a pessimist...
Just a thought, though...
--Stak
Holy happy hippy crap!
Jobs is far from being man of the decade, but if this poll is evidence of anything, it's that Jobs is a marketing guru.
The minute someone puts Ben Bernanke on a "Person of the _____" list as a choice, the list is invalidated. Bernanke, like Greenspan, created policy that causes recessions and depressions and then makes them worse.
I can't understand why people continue to give any credibility to these deadpulp periodicals and their online offspring.
So, out of a bunch of people who have done bugger all other than accumulate wealth, Jobs won.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Really? Everyone was already downloading and listening to MP3s a good while back before the first iPod was released to the market and iTunes was launched. I mean, Napster was up and running since around 1999 and, way before that, IRC was swarming with channels dedicated to transferring MP3 albums through DCC file transfers. The mIRC world was packed with scripts to automatically handle that stuff. Before that there was already a pretty extensive sneakernet dedicated to exchange music files through CD-Rs packed with MP3. Heck, back in 1994 I knew a group of people who were ripping CDs to WAV files and lending hard drives with that stuff (they were idiots but to each it's own). So, how exactly can a corporation "forever change the way people listen to music" if everyone was already doing exactly that for years before the company released a product?
Apple deserves credit in exploring the "pay to download music files" market, particularly by convincing record companies to authorize a new business model to sell their product. Yet, they didn't changed any habits. They realized that there was an extensive and overwhelming demand for downloading music (there was a heck of a lot of people doing that) and they invested in an attempt to capitalize from that demand. They succeeded at that. But changing the way people listen to music? No, they didn't. They were successful in riding the wave but I'm sorry to tell you, they didn't changed any habits.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
I'm glad Steve Jobs turned Apple into the company it did. Now that Apple PC's and MP3 Players and Phones are so expensive, I can make fun of those pompous pricks who think they are better than everyone because they have a certain iTem.
Now I don't have to feel ashamed for using a PC.
*half hearted smile*
*lowers head*
*breaks into tears*
Obama won a peace prize.
I assume they will back-date the award to the 90's.
They tend to skew towards the young, tech savvy, and vocal. I'm sure many slashdotters have voted in polls on sites that they didn't frequent because someone told them it was a good idea, and we all know how vocal Apple Fanboys are.
That aside, Jobs was very important this decade. He helped bring about a credible threat to the Windows OS (causing Microsoft to make many positive changes), he helped to reform the music industry, bringing the aging RIAA and record companies to their knees, and he has shown the direction that telcos must move in as far as mobile computing by causing AT&T's 3G network to buckle. He was very influential, especially in the field of computing, and more deserving than most.
Now, personally I would have said that GW Bush was the most influential person of the decade. He was the most powerful man in the world for 8 (technically 7, whatever) years. He made an enormous power grab for the executive branch, changed how the country views terrorism (be scared, very scared), and brought several countries into two wars, one of which is hopefully mostly over, and the other with no end in sight. Also, under his watch, the worldwide economy took an enormous tumble due to his lax policies, with considerable help from previous presidents, especially Clinton and Reagan. To me, his influence was far greater than anything Jobs has done.
But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.
At the beginning of the decade, he was a political unknown. At the end of the decade, he is President. That's a pretty good accomplishment.
And there are very few of us who wouldn't want to take a time machine back to 2003 and buy a few thousand shares of GOOG.
I'd rather go to 1890 and get me a couple of shares of GOGH.
Vincent van, that is.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
So, this wraps up another Decade of Dreadful Apple Ads. (I couldn't resist.)
The summary was written in the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field.
Remember people, Apple is a follower just like every big corporation. In the MP3 player's case, they waited for the industry to grow 'big enough' then sold a unique-enough player with total subservience to the media conglomerates and backed it up with extreme amounts of advertising.
Could any other company do the same? Probably not. One main reason being Jobs' participation in device design. The other being an advertising budget that no rival would ever commit. That doesn't justify the overblown reference to the ipod.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
-- he'd be "King", not merely "Person" of the decade!
Voice: :"Well, I didn't vote for ya."
Other voice: "You don't "vote" for a King."
Ad infinitum/absurdum.
For many of you, this comment would be a whoosh moment.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Look, I would have voted for Google myself as having greater impact, part of the problem is that the impact is not as widely noticed or has been forgotten since we are all used to how things are. But I think you are a little bit guilty of that with Apple as well.
If nothing else, Apple single-handedly made the entire music industry give up DRM, ironically (well not really ironically since it's an inevitable side effect of the technology) by using DRM to place Apple between customers and music labels in a way the labels could not control. We all just take DRM free music for granted but we'd not have that generally available yet without Apple, because the market would have remain too fragmented to force the need for DRM free music to get around Apple.
You may call it a "crappy store" but it was the first time selling music online ever went anywhere, and to date is far larger than any other online music presence and even most real world stores. I'm not sure how you can dismiss that out of hand as irrelevant.
And then of course they actually made smartphones a generally desirable product instead of a niche with corporate and technical users.
So in at least two areas they greatly expanded the whole range of the market, not just their own marketshare. That is why they deserve to be in the top list, even if you can quibble about who is really at THE top.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It at least didn't say *Good* person of the ____. I.e. Hitler was a strong candidate for 'person of the century' in Time magazine's reckoning, but happened to be edged out by positive people (probably because they feared people assuming 'person of the century' was automatically an honor and therefore it was safer to go with Einstein). Most of these lists purport not to measure 'good' but how influential a person was.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
With him leveraging someone else's organ, wouldn't it be more appropriate to use the plural? Persons of the year?
A self-selecting Web poll for Person of the Decade, and the result is not Rick Astley?!
SJ is probably the best of that list, sure, but what a crappy list.
No sig today...
What did he do exactly? He sure didn't invent the mp3 player.
No sig today...
Whoever wrote this list appears to have omitted Steve Ballmer. I assume the article will be corrected in short order.
Sent from my iPhone
What has Steve Jobs done to stop world-wide suffering with all his wealth? Bill Gates for person of the decade.
Gas was about $1.26 a gallon when he took office and oil was under $20 per barrel.
So quadrupling the price to over $5.00 per gallon then getting it back 'back under $3 a gallon' is not much of an accomplishment. It started its trend upward in mid 2003.
The fact that G.W. stood up to the V.P. and opposed the use of military force on U.S. soil surprised me and is something to remember Bush for.
Gas 'under $3'? We had that before he took office and well after 9/11.
If I missed your sarcasm tags, then I'm sorry
They typically are pretty skewed towards young people. Young people are much more likely to be out of touch with current events and much more in touch with technology. Now I'm not going to bash Jobs by any means! He has started the downfall of Windows or at least has taken a nice bite out of M$'s market share. He has changed the music industry for the better--think iTunes where you can almost get a song for what it's worth for once! He has produced the most popular, most advanced phone on the planet. He has made so many simple "why didn't I think of that?" products that still have not been paralleled even by copying. Every Apple product is distinctly an Apple product!
I personally would have said that Bush was the most influential person of the decade. He was the most powerful man in the world for eight years. He made an enormous power grab for the executive branch, changed how the country views terrorism (be scared, very scared), and brought several countries into two wars, one of which is hopefully mostly over, and the other with no end in sight. Also, under his watch, the worldwide economy took an enormous tumble due to his lax policies, with considerable help from previous presidents, especially Clinton and Reagan. To me, his influence was far greater than anything Jobs has done.
ain't this the trouth!
I mean, a long time ago people were humming and whistling and stuff. I don't see where this iPod stuff is any different. What's the big deal? I was whistling and humming back in the '70's. I didn't get no man of the decade award.
“...by a load of Apple fanboys in a flash-mob-like stunt”. ^^
But on a more serious note: Would you want to get called “person of the decade” by a bunch of crooks that have no other purpose in life than the pointless pursuit of “moar moneyz”?
Just so you know, that’s the typical user of that site: http://lolfatcats.com/page/3
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
The poll was done by SmartMoney.com so their emphasis would be on investors. In the past decade other individuals have had more influence on humanity in general but that's not the focus of this poll. This isn't a humanitarian of the decade award. Over the past decade, Steve Jobs had led Apple from the brink of doom to be a highly influential player in several markets: Music, Computers, Consumer electronics, and Cell phones. In that time, Apple's price has risen nearly 10x (from 25.90 on Dec 31, 1999 to nearly 209.04 today) while splitting the stock twice. From an investor's point of the view, that's an impressive performance.
Google has done well but has only been offered since 2004 and not the whole decade. Their stock has risen nearly 7x since the IPO. Good performance but not as good as Apple.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Are you kidding me? They put Ben Bernanke on the list? The guy who didn't see a housing bubble till after it burst? The guy who said the banks didn't need regulation right up until they collapsed? THAT Ben Bernanke? The crappy little middle manager who is way out of his depth??
I know he's gone around pretending he's saved the planet, but he hasn't you know. He's just shifted the bad assets onto the Fed and that is why the dollar is dropping and the oil producers are creating their own currency.
So I'm staggered that Ben Bernanke is on the list! A prison list for fraud yes, FBI's most wanted list yes, but "Person of the Decade"?? FFS!
You do understand that those 'assets' (mostly worthless betting slips) have no value and the Fed didn't have the legal authority to buy junk to back the dollar. So he's put the US$ at risk by this scam, and now he's trying to prevent Congress auditing the Fed's books... gee I wonder why?!
Enron didn't last forever. Madoff didn't sustain the fraud forever, Bernanke won't either.
Has SmartMoney.com been around for a decade?
come back when they have been...
Seriously, this is what I would like to know. What policy decision of Bush was it that sunk the economy?
Did Bush deficits sunk the economy? Make that argument, but, most economists would say that deficits are Keynsien and stimulatory, and indeed, Bush's deficits, in particular, his stimulus package, had more of an immediate impact on GDP than Obama's stimulus did. If anything, Bush's 400B deficits should have proved that there was no way that Obama's 1.5T deficit could possibly work and Keynes is a fraud. Since we're 1.5T of stimulus and the economy is getting worse, that's probably it.
Did lax oversite sink the economy? I mean, the Bush administration was famously shot down on attempts to reel in Fannie Mae, and that right there is what really caused the banking collapse. There was Chris Dodd saying Fannie Mae is doing great, Maxine Waters saying that picking on Fannnie Mae is racist, right up until Fannie Mae went over the cliff and the Feds had to pony up 700B to cover for Fannie Mae's junk.
Did the war sink the economy? I don't think so. The war is only about 200B a year. It's a drain, to be sure, but on the flipside, the USA has 100,000 soldiers sitting on the last unexploited reserve of petroleum on the planet... so there's an upside to it.
Charges like this are routine, but the reality is, what sunk the economy is free trade. The grim reality is pretty simple. Every time you go to Walmart and buy something, you send a dollar overseas. That dollar is someone else's job, helps asian countries play games with our currency, and generally screws the country up. If anyone sank the economy, its people buying foreign products.
The thing is, yes, you could say Bush sank the economy because he was pro-free trade. But Free Trade is actually an invention of the Progressive Democrats - Wilson was pro-free trade, and made it a goal for WWI, Roosevelt was pro-free trade, and made it a goal for WWII, and got it. Really, all Bush did was follow along in the path all the other Presidents that kept expanding trade around the globe.
So yeah, bash Bush for being a free trader and sinking the economy, but remember that Truman let in the Europeans after WWII, so we have German cars and French stuff competing with American jobs, Johnson let in the Japanese, Clinton let in the Chinese and Bush Jr let in India. Every President has been doing it, and if you are going to blame Bush for it, blame him, yes, by all means, but lets have an admission that free trade failed and let me know Obama is putting up the barriers, like Reagan did.
This is my sig.
I'm pretty sure they're referring to the iPod being revolutionary... not iTunes.
mARBLECAKE ALSO THE GAME
IF it wasn't for Ben Bernanke studying the Great Depressions, and seeing the liquidity crisis and the hardship that it caused, we would have not had "helicopters of money" and unemployment would be 20% nationally, and 50% in regions, and we would be working WPA jobs. Democracies would be toppled by desperate people, perhaps even our own, and the world would be lurching to war.
So, by far, Ben Bernanke is the right man in the right place at the right time. This recession sucks, but he kept it from getting a lot worse. The man should have his own fricking face on a coin, for what he did.
This is my sig.
If you're definition of "everyone" means "college kids in the late '90s" then I'd suspect you are right.
But the iPod made it easy and mainstream to find and listen to mp3s. Now Apple, because of Jobs, dominates the lucrative market for legal, commercial distribution of music and portable music playing devices.
I'm not saying this makes him a person of the decade. But you are way off base if you think a majority or even a significant minority of people got their music from IRC or hard drives, even USENET, at any point in history. I will grant that Napster was immensely popular at its peak (almost 30 million users before it was shut down, if I recall). But to make my point again, Napster's popularity was primarily among college and high school kids and during its life it was never a sustainable, profitable business.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Find any thread about Apple and the first thing that tends to get posted are Apple haters spewing their tired arguments and labeling anyone owning an Apple product a fanboy. I just don't get it, no one forces anyone to buy Apple products. Sure there are better products than most apple stuff on a technical level but for the average consumer ease of use and just working properly are the most important features, and Apple tends to excel at both. Why not just respect that others might actually like their stuff and get over it?
Anyway as for Job's, I dont know if I would have named him Person of the Decade but as usual the figurehead gets all the credit for the hard work of the people below them. I would however agree that Apple in general has changed both the music and cell phone business for the better whether you buy them or not, their influence on other products has been undeniable even to the apple haters who still use the ipod and macs as a baseline comparison most of the time in trying to argue why their product choice is "better". Would the ZuneHD, Android or MyTouch even exist if Apple hadnt raised the bar with the ipod and iphone?
I listen to mobile music from a walkman (Sony) to a minidisc(sony) to a CD(philips) that eventually could play MP3(Fraunhoffer) and then my first HD MP3 player (Creative) then expanding to OGG/FLAC capable players (iRiver) and finally settling on my current one (Cowon).
And I bought my music first on tape, then LP then CD then Mini-Disc and then got it via Usenet and then Napster and now via Torrents.
Where is Apples involvement? Now I would disguss further, but the RIAA wants a word with me.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I hope the person of the decade would be someone who improve the humanity rather than making life lazier and much convenient.
Well, I still don't own an Iphone or Ipod...
Sorry, the iPod was also not revolutionary, not by a long shot. The iPod was released in 2001 and back then there were already a lot of portable digital players in the market such as the Diamond Rio PMP300, which was launched around 3 years before the iPod, way back in 1998. If you arrive 3 years late into an already large market you cannot claim any revolutionary status. Even our slasdot's history dispels the myth that apple's iPod represents any sort of revolution.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
A common problem here is that slashdotters think that "Me=everyone" or "Geeks=everyone". Back in 1999 many people were using napsters and had discovered MP3s. The first players were on the market. I even had a Rio PMP. But not "everyone" knew about MP3s or were using these players.
Apple has never been leading edge when it comes to tech. What Apple does better than anybody else did was bringing technology to an average consumer.
The most important thing about the iPod was that it was never designed for geeks here on slashdot. It was designed for an average consumer. iPod with iTunes software made it ridiculously easy for an average person to use an MP3 player. The player itself was intuitive. Compare that with what existed before if you wanted to get MP3s off a CD. You had to use a "ripper" program and then an "encoder" program and then another program to manage the MP3s on the player. If you accepted the iTunes defaults, you just stick in a CD and it does it all. Which method do you think your grandparents would actually employ?
Well for the average person, getting music before iTunes was buying a CD. Now it's getting it online. Other than changing how most people buy music, Apple hasn't changed anything. Remember, Apple is now the #1 music retailer now surpassing Walmart, Target, Best Buy. They did it by making it really easy for an average consumer to buy.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Really? Everyone was already downloading and listening to MP3s
See, and that is what Steve Jobs has done - he turned the meaning of "everyone" from "a moderate part of the computer geek community" to, well, "everyone". Somebody who was part of the old "everyone" may have a problem of recognizing that.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
You're forgetting that we're tech geeks here. Sure, I was trading mp3s on Efnet in 1997 (anyone remember #poptart.net? best place for full live shows for a long time...), but you had to be reasonably computer savvy to do that (I'm not saying it's hard to use IRC, I'm just saying technophobes probably won't figure it out). I also remember having tons of headaches ripping CDs reliably back in those days. I couldn't believe how easy it was the first time I saw someone rip a CD with itunes and sync it to their ipod in college. I still had my beloved 20GB Archos mp3 player that was half the price of an ipod, and I would download music from IRC or DC++ back in those days. But, like I said, I'm a tech geek. Apple didn't change the way geeks listened to music. They just made what we'd been doing for a few years so simple that anyone could do it.
I'm using all of my mod points to mod ancient memes down. Please join me.
I'm seem to remember Shawn Fanning coming up with the idea of music downloads (not as a business, obviously), I suppose Apple invented that just like they invented MultiTouch...
Before the ipod, mp3 players were as big as CD players and almost no one used them. Now ipods are completely ubiquitous and when people think of portable music, they immediately think of an ipod. That's a huge accomplishment.
MABASPLOOM!
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
Why did the dot-com bubble sink the economy? Because we had a bunch of people throwing their money after absurdly overpriced Internet businesses. Then it all fell apart.
Why did the mortgage bubble sink the economy? Because we had a bunch of people throwing their money after absurdly overpriced real estate, with government subsidizing the worst of the business... homebuyers and mortgages alike. Then they took additional loans out on the (overpriced) equity, and businesses built themselves to cater to this false affluence, so these businesses fell apart too.
Cutting back free trade? Bah! Having one percent of the economy charge the rest of the economy double what they pay now for cheap manufactured goods wouldn't have saved us from this recession, and it won't pull us out of the recession now, either.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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Congrats Steve. I think Apple really lead the way with mp3 players and creating a place to legally download music. It wasn't perfect at first, with stuff like DRM and having to use iTunes with your iPod, but they were first, and had to make money somehow.
He's just a senior exec doing his job well. Most of us aren't. Instead, we suck up to him. Geesh!
John Carmack would have accomplished more technically along with his team by releasing Doom 3 (Its graphic engine specifically! An artpiece!) and fostering Armadillo Aerospace, than Mr. Jobs spreading the tentacles of profiteering to brainwashed numbnuts who'll buy anything christened by him (apparently).
30 years from now, he would just be a footnote or special feature in the chronicles of our time. Than a "person of the decade". Hilarious, indeed!
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de.
That's where a person's merit is measured by the return on investments in the stocks of the corporation(s) that person owns.
Jobs is the shithead that yelled at people who did design the hardware when it didn't meet his personal expectations. He isn't a visionary, just an exceptional salesman. Perhaps at one time he had a hand in design, but these days he's about as much the design man as Homer Simpson was in that episode where he designed the over engineered car. I'm sure I'll be modded into oblivion for telling it how it is but someone has to say it.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
So some random site names a guy Person of the Decade. Who gives a shit? A nobody website (when it comes to things like this) conducted some half-assed poll on their site and we're supposed to care even one iota? Hey, guess what.. my website polled me, and found I was named Person of the Decade! Eat that Steve Jobs!
Down with the career politician! SUPPORT TERM LIMITS
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Really? Everyone was already downloading and listening to MP3s
Everyone? 10 years ago? Not a chance in hell. Maybe in certain segments of the population, but not a majority; probably not even double-digit percentages.
Yeah, I was certainly listening to mp3s while the CEO seat at Apple was still warm from Gil Amelio's butt, and I used Napster, AudioGalaxy, mp3.com, emusic, and ripped CDs and played around with various mp3 hardware players. But I was a vanishing minority in my circle of acquaintances. Even most people I knew with big mp3 collections didn't have a hardware player they took everywhere... until somewhere around the time iPod hit its stride. You can argue that this was just good marketing, or it was just the time when cost, size, and capacity hit a magic point point of broad appeal, or you can argue that Apple did some real work which got the devices to that point and putting together a platform for distribution and management. But in any case, mp3 players weren't wide-market devices until the iPod was.
But more to the point... I was also a vanishing minority among people who got music online in that I paid for it. Occasionally. Generally, I didn't pay for most of it, in no small part because nobody was selling what I wanted. The iTunes music store was the first place where you were likely to be able to easily find and purchase a wide variety of popular music. It's no exaggeration to say that Apple basically created and defined the mainstream online music marketplace.
And if you set the wayback machine for around 2001, it's not really clear that they had any particular advantage over other potential players... it could have easily been media focused entities like Napster or Real, or it could have been Microsoft with their tech market power, or it could have been supreme retailers Amazon or Wal-Mart. Or maybe even Creative or Diamond or somebody else who was first to market with hardware. All of these people would have apparently had some advantage over a niche computer maker with no successful previous forays into the relevant markets (and in fact, legal agreements to stay out of music).
Maybe somebody else would have done it if they hadn't. Or maybe we'd still be grabbing our stuff from the latest whack-a-mole p2p network or buying from Russian sites or insisting loudly that we prefer generally superior indie music so we're totally content with the limited section of eiomusic.com. But Apple's the one that did it, and in the process, they've positioned themselves to be part of shaping mobile computing and communications in general.
Tweet, tweet.
...Bill Gates, remember him? Even just in the field of computing, no one person had a larger impact on the world than old Bill. You may say it was a negative impact, but Microsoft still produces so much more of the software used around the world, that Apple's proportion is about equal to the sales tax for Microsoft products. (Even less, if you're buying your stuff in Euro's and paying VAT.)
And now Bill is using his well-earned money (or, at least, "earned") to make the world a better place. You won't see Jobs doing that, the fanboi factor isn't high enough.
Do you get what you're saying at all? 30 million users! that's not small, especially for the pre-2000 internet. Napster was popular among geeks, not just "college and high school kids". At that time there was almost no other way to trade music. Other than trading data cds filled with MP3s or lan-parties. There was IRC and FTP places as well, but napster was the place to go for the short time it existed.
Most of my music is from that time period, i only need to buy new music that comes out. Even now, i sometimes trade albums with friends at lan-parties.
If you were a geek in 2000, you traded your music digitally and you listened to it digitally. When you bought a CD, you ripped it and put it away in the closet.
I used an MP3 CD-player to listen to my stuff, i couldn't afford a RIO (drooled over the RIO). The MP3 players at the time could only hold a few dozen songs, i prefered MP3-CDs because you could fit several hundred. Mp3 player companies were getting sued like crazy too (which i'm sure hampered development).
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
they have lots of Apple stock?
You are forgetting that apple was the first Online music store that implimented DRM
Actually they were not the first. There were other smaller music stores around before iTunes, all used DRM (except eMusic which as you note didn't have large labels - because they would not use DRM).
Apple didn't want to use DRM ether, they stated so repeatedly - it's bad for the user experience after all, which is what Apple is all about. They were forced to by the labels.
But as a result of success of iTunes, no other music store could really sell music well exactly because of iTunes DRM - which the labels made Apple use. So in the end the labels had no choice but to abandon DRM, so they could sell music through channels other than iTunes.
You can argue that iTunes store "was the first time selling music online ever went anywhere" because they had the clout and lawyers to get Big Labels to sign on.
It was wholly because they agreed to DRM, just like the other small stores around at the same time. Apple just had the fortune to have enough software expertise to actually make buying music online practical and compelling compared to piracy, and so the store grew. And as is inevitable with any DRM system, once you have one player dominate it's impossible to remove them because so many people have music using the dominant form of DRM they are locked in.
Apple just made it trendy and not just a geek thing.
If by "trendy" you mean "mainstream", then yes. "Trendy" is a word implying something that ends after a finite period. I don't think people will lose the taste for playing music, ever.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Really? Everyone was already downloading and listening to MP3s a good while back before the first iPod was released to the market and iTunes was launched. I mean, Napster was up and running since around 1999 and, way before that, IRC was swarming with channels dedicated to transferring MP3 albums through DCC file transfers.
So if "everyone" was downloading MP3's in 1999, why did IRC (EFnet for sake of over exageration) only have a max user count in the 6 digits when there are billions of people on the planet included in "everyone"?
I think by "everyone" you mean a very small group of technically minded folk that easily numbers under a billion.. probably closer to a million.
Unless of course one out of every 1000-10000 people counts as everyone now.
I'll leave it to you to explain why only a million technically minded people actually knew what MP3's were let alone used them pre-apple, and why tens of millions of non-technical people now enjoy MP3's due to Apple...
They add a DAMN GOOD user interface. Which, at the end of the day, is what made the iPhone, the iPod, and Mac OS X.
And, as Linux, Windows, and the incredibly crowded universe of phones continually demonstrate, it's not easy to come up with a good user interface.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Yet this is only about music.
No, with Apple it's about music and portable computing (and a few other things but those are the big ones). That's why I would say they are near the top. But you are right, Google I think gets the nod for more fundamental change, it's just as I said far less visible a thing they have done, as they way things were is far more forgotten and not really understood by a large majority of people.
Say what you will, Google has transformed the decade far more than Jobs and Apple have.
Well it's what I said so I don't really have a problem with saying it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
See my previous post.
If user interfaces weren't so important, Apple would have died in the '80s.
And if great user interfaces were so easy to achieve, Microsoft and Linux with their respective massive resource pools ($$$$ for Microsoft and eyeballs+coders for Linux) would have come up with them already.
Instead, in the user interface space, everyone is playing distant catch-up to Apple.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The real leader paragraph of the story indicates that he was the favorite person to a bunch of people that read a stock trading magazine. And he should be, given what he's done for the company's stock.
A full 30% of SmartMoney readers participating in our Person of the Decade poll, part of our weeklong Poll of the Decade series, named Jobs as their favorite person of the decade. Certainly, Jobs accomplished more than probably any other CEO since he returned to Apple (AAPL: 209.92*, -1.69, -0.79%) in the late 1990s: Not only did he revive sales at the failing computer company, he led the stock to a more than 700% increase in value, and forever changed the way people buy and listen to music.
Emphasis mine.
He did all those things, though they may be overselling the whole changing the way people listen to music thing.
"There are no facts, only interpretations." --Friedrich Nietzsche.
Come on... Everyone? Geeks, yes. Today you can buy iTunes gift cards in gas stations all over the world and people know what these are good for.
It's incredible what selection bias can do. If you were part of it and the people around you were part of it, you think it was everyone. It wasn't. This was an extremely limited thing and iTunes and the iPod changed that. As long as you don't understand that even dragging downloaded mp3-files to a player attached as an USB mass-storage device is something that most people will never bother with, you're still living in a fantasy world. There is a lesson in that and believe me, most people in the computer industry haven't learned that yet.
My point is that 30 million people is many fewer than the total number of people who listened to music at the height of Napster's popularity.
It's also many fewer than the 250 million or so iPods that have been sold to date.
Steve Jobs changed how people listened to music.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
THAT is kinda way too far.
Not sure if patent would even hold for that long, with inventor and patent-holder being couple of hundred millennia younger then the invention and patent.
Might just as well go to the beginning of time and register as GOD, but something like that is not really quantifiable in dollars.
Won't get you no "Person of the Decade" awards.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Maybe Apple's success is all marketing, but guess what, marketing is part of business too, and for the past decade Apple has been extremely good at business. This is not an engineering or originality award.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Everyone was already downloading and listening to MP3s a good while back before the first iPod was released to the market and iTunes was launched... Apple deserves credit in exploring the "pay to download music files" market, particularly by convincing record companies to authorize a new business model to sell their product. Yet, they didn't changed any habits.
My parents weren't downloading MP3s from Napster in 1999. Neither were my aunts and uncles nor were my siblings. Yes, yes, I'm sure you knew several high school kids who were ahead of the curve on that one, but ultimately Napster wasn't a big deal because everyone was doing it. It was a big deal because record companies realized what would happen to them if everyone started doing it.
It wasn't until iTunes hit the scene that a lot of the downloading turned legit. Now Apple sells more music than Walmart. In my personal (admittedly anecdotal) experience, I know lots of people ranging from 12-70 years old who own iPods and use iTunes as their exclusive source of music. That's not nothing.
Utter and total BS! "Everyone" is not you and your 3 HS friends. Napster never had classical music or an international catalog worth shit; Apple does. Napster did what it did without the approval of the music industry, which ultimeately sunk them; Apple didn't, and they soared. IRC?? You gotta be f*cking kidding, when has anyone made a buck outta IRC, much less a multi-million dollar service? You "knew a group of people in 1994" that pirated some music and that makes them worth mentioning in your book, while making a profit out of the MILLIONS of people ACROSS THE WORLD that TODAY BUY (i.e., pay hard earned $$$) EVERY DAY for all sorts of music genres (and TV and movies) only deserves your fake contempt? Hypocrites of the world, allow me to introduce you to your new King, the Great Bunzinni!!!
A financial magazine giving him an award
Lest we forget that Jobs narrowly avoided getting done for fraud in the last year.....
I patently hate that skivvy wearing "no ideas myself im just a headpiece for the R&D Department" wanker
Apple should have died as a business 10 years ago
If you saw a deer lying by the side of the road obviously on its way out of this world, you would hook it up to an oxygen mask and then occasionally, when its not buying new organs (because the rich can do that), you trundle it out for another marketing blitz
And i will never have an Apple product in my home, never
All they do is take a pre-existing product, add gloss and make it look nice and the sheep come pouring in. What a stupid time we live in, Idiocracy is not far away.
So in other words, if you don't understand what people find compelling about Apple's products, it's because everyone else who does is an idiot. Clearly, they've been deceived by marketing or distracted by gloss -- if they just really understood things, the way you do, nobody would buy, right?
Practicality over aesthetics I say.
As if this were a dichotomy.
Tweet, tweet.
Come back next year when the decade really ends and lets see where he is then. This is a bit premature.
If you honestly believe that Apple didn't change any habits regarding listening to music then you are a fool.
You do realise that this is 100% horseshit, don't you? Apple wanted iTunes DRM very badly - they fought for it in court (and via lobbying) repeatedly.
I realize your claim is horseshit. Please provide a single link where they fought FOR DRM. They were the ones that convinced EMI to go DRM free and that broke the logjam. Apple were the ones who issued a public statement on how the labels were screwing up.
And as I noted, common sense tells us Apple doesn't want DRM because DRM leads to things being harder for users and more support costs. The only people who want DRM are content providers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I had thousands and thousands of DRM free MP3s several years before iTunes dropped their DRM.
So did I (all ripped with iTunes BTW).
But I meant the online sale of commercial digital music. Free MP3's were around everywhere, Apple was the one that offered a viable alternative where the labels could actually sell music instead of having it all being snapped up for free. Your very statement is proof of this.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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So he popularised an existing technology? Well kudos to him. Up there with Ford & Microsoft I guess.