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Larry Ellison Believes Apple Is Doomed
Nerval's Lobster writes "Oracle CEO Larry Ellison thinks that Apple will collapse without Steve Jobs at the helm. In a televised interview with CBS News, scheduled to air August 13, Ellison called the deceased Jobs 'brilliant' and compared him to iconic creators such as Thomas Edison and Pablo Picasso. When asked about Apple's future now that Jobs is dead, Ellison didn't hold back: 'We already know, we saw — we conducted the experiment, it's been done.' Raising his hand above his head, presumably to indicate the rise of Apple's fortunes during Jobs' initial reign, Ellison said: 'We saw Apple with Steve Jobs.' Then he lowered his hand: "We saw Apple without Steve Jobs." In other words, the period following Jobs' ouster, when the company's revenues declined and it launched whole portfolios of consumer products that failed. 'We saw Apple with Steve Jobs,' Ellison continued, raising his hand above his head again — this time, to suggest that incandescent period following Jobs' return to the company, when it released the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and a variety of bestselling PCs. 'And now, we're going to see Apple without Steve Jobs,' he finished, and his hand fell."
More to the point, Larry thinks the NSA program of collecting everything is "excellent" and "necessary".
Larry also is whining about Google adhering to the Sun Java license as it was written and intended. Larry would prefer they send him large amounts of money instead.
Larry can go to his private Hawaiian island fuck himself.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Apple's success now is not based on the iMac or iPod still being cool. If they are successful in the future, it will not be based on the iPhone or iPad still being cool. It would have to be "something else." Figuring out what that would be is the hard part.
"...wealth isn't the same thing as intelligence." -Larry Ellison
I don't "do" Apple but hearing Larry Ellison postulate about the future is laughable. The guy got all his money through vendor lock-in and insane licensing models. If he was that bright, he'd be more innovative.
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The world needs dicks like Jobs and Edison. They get things done. Woz is definitely the more brilliant mind among the two, yet what grand mark did he leave us with after the Apple II? With Jobs you can point to the Mac (the first one and the reborn NeXT one), the iPod, the iPad, and the iPhone (not to mention some really nice animated movies). You have to give him some credit towards legal, affordable, mainstream music downloads - eventually DRM free, no less. Sure, he was a colossal dick, and by all accounts a weird, picky, self-centered dude. But the man knew what he wanted, and he knew how to get it. Things got done, and he changed several markets that he decided to enter into.
Edison is the same way. Yeah, he gambled and lost on DC power. Yeah, Tesla was by far the more brilliant man. But the world needs managers, too - and Edison was a master at managing large teams toward a goal... or at least he was far better at it than most other people at the time. The result? Tesla did a bunch of cool things, but his biggest contributions came when he was working for someone else. Edison, on the other hand, get's credited for a staggering number of inventions that his team cranked out - and which shaped the world of the time. Phonograph, carbon microphone, practical lightbulb, alkaline battery, and numerous electricity-related innovations...
I LIKE Woz better, and I think he's a better role model. Tesla is way cooler. But I'm glad Edison existed and I'm glad Jobs knew better than Xerox what the world would buy.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
And yet most Android manufacturers are taking a loss right now... so having a larger market share isn't working out too well for them... The one exception seems to be Samsung, but only because they borrowed a page from Apple's Marketing department and started making fun of the competition (from a conceptual point-of-view the Samsung ad's making fun of the lines for the latest iDevice aren't that different from the Mac vs PC ads). Samsung is even starting to follow Apple's device announcement/release schedule.
People keep saying Android is eating Apple's lunch, yet Apple had revenues of $35.6 Billion of which $6.9 Billion was profit... And that was during a down quarter when they had no new devices released and sales started to drop off as people wait for the next iDevice. $6.9 Billion... with a 'B'.... That's a lot of money. They're hardly in any financial pain over Android's growth.
Sculley, who bet the farm on the Newton, which bombed? Sculley, who fractured the Mac lineup into a large number of similar and confusing models? Sculley, who had Apple branch out into every random consumer electronic category he could think of, including digital cameras, videogame consoles, CD players, speakers, television STBs, and even television/computer hybrids, every single one of which flopped?
Things didn't necessarily get much better after he was fired, but his lack of vision and direction are part of the reason that Apple was 90 days from bankruptcy when Jobs took over and got the investment from Microsoft.
Say what you will about Jobs, he was very good at simplifying the product lineup and focusing on a vision. Still, I think that Apple ousting Steve jobs was the best thing that ever happened to both Jobs and Apple. For Jobs, particularly, the experience of the NeXT disaster was extremely educational.
Steve knew something everyone else never quite got - there are people who will spend a lot of money on an image product. His first Macs were nothing special, performance-wise, but set a new style benchmark. PC clones were ugly, beige, cumbersome and suddenly there was this Bang & Olufsen sort of style which looked great on a desktop. Every product since was about materials and style.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar