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How Steve Jobs Outsmarted Carly Fiorina
HughPickens.com writes: Carly Fiorina likes to boast about her friendship with Apple founder Steve Jobs but Fortune Magazine reports that it turns out Carly may have outfoxed of by Apple's late leader. In January 2004, Steve Jobs and Carly Fiorina cut a deal where HP could slap its name on Apple's wildly successful iPod and sell it through HP retail channels but HP still managed to botch things up. The MP3 player worked just like a regular iPod, but it had HP's logo on the back and in return HP agreed to continue pre-loading iTunes onto its PCs. According to Steven Levy soon after the deal with HP was inked, Apple upgraded the iPod, making HP's version outdated and because of Fiorina's deal HP was banned from selling its own music player until August 2006. "This was a highly strategic move to block HP/Compaq from installing Windows Media Store on their PCs," says one Apple source. "We wanted iTunes Music store to be a definitive winner. Steve only did this deal because of that."
In short, Fiorina's "good friend" Steve Jobs blithely mugged her and HP's shareholders. By getting Fiorina to adopt the iPod as HP's music player, Jobs had effectively gotten his software installed on millions of computers for free, stifled his main competitor, and gotten a company that prided itself on invention to declare that Apple was a superior inventor.
In short, Fiorina's "good friend" Steve Jobs blithely mugged her and HP's shareholders. By getting Fiorina to adopt the iPod as HP's music player, Jobs had effectively gotten his software installed on millions of computers for free, stifled his main competitor, and gotten a company that prided itself on invention to declare that Apple was a superior inventor.
Carly may have outfoxed of by Apple's late leader
Why do you even post things anymore, timothy?
I always took a full week of vacation off when I worked there.
Is this what USasians think is a generous vacation policy? You're seriously impressed about being able to take a whole week of vacation?!? LOL.
Considering she's running for president, it shouldn't be surprising at all that her record gets raked over with a fine-toothed comb.
As for the deal itself, it definitely sounds like HP tried to gain advantage, but Apple came out as the clear winner, with HP (and Fiorinia) looking entirely foolish. Given the rest of her tenure at HP (and elsewhere), I'm not surprised in the least to hear it. She's never been any sort of true visionary, and having Jobs leave her in the dust with having doubled down on what was soon to be yesterday's technology, while he focused on what was really key is exactly what I would expect.
So is it really a "hit piece" to tell what happened, and put it in proper context? Why was HP wasting its time doing things like buying Compaq, and trying to piggyback on Apple's successes? If she was really a visionary, shouldn't she have been leading the market and innovating the way Jobs was?
Fiorina couldn't lead lemmings to a cliff. Given the two bad alternatives, I'd have to choose Trump.
The fact that these candidates are the best that we as a country can muster is pretty pathetic. I know we have really thoughtful and intelligent people in this country, but for whatever reason, they don't seem to be able (or want) to compete with the horribly inept batch of clowns that we inevitably get.
America is basically like a very badly run company (e.g. like HP). The mediocre rise to the top. Actually Carly seems exactly like the sort of president we deserve. She can speak well enough to disguise the fact that what she is saying is completely retarded. Compare this skillset to Ted Cruz, Rick Perry, and Trump, and it makes her look like a teacher in a room full of shitty kids.
Given that the rest of the Republican candidates seem to be experts at leading lemmings off cliffs, I'd say that was a point in her favour.
Fiorina's not stupid.
Stupid? Maybe not. Incompetent? Hell, yeah. Just ask anyone who worked at Lucent, HP or Compaq.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
To call a man decent because he admits that he wants to steal everything you own, is missing the point.
Since when did Bernie Sanders become a Capitalist?
Similar to the upcoming US election results
socialism: public safety nets. much cheaper and higher quality healthcare. affordable higher education. source: canada, denmark, germany, norway, etc... countries richer, healthier, happier, better educated, and *freer* than the usa: no financial parasites funneling money out of their society via cozy relationships paid for by corrupt elections, for nothing in return, because regulating corporations and plutocrats is "against freedom"
communism: gulags and mass starvation and no free speech and no free press and no freedom of religion and control and fear and genocide and hour long lines to get scratchy toilet paper. that's canada and germany, right?
american moron: socialism = communism, because hysterical low iq propaganda that hasn't had an original thought since mccarthy's 1950s red scare bullshit means that binary choices between communism and capitalism are the only choices in a subject matter, economics, that in reality, has thousands of complex variations. but... we'll just stick to our ignorant kneejerk biases, because it serves our plutocrat masters who produce the propaganda to keep us misinformed, poor and unhealthy, and we like it because we're useful fools
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Jobs got booted and went on to outdo Apple sufficently that they ended up buying him back and more or less gutting their own products to rebuild them around his.
Not really. Jobs got booted and went on to meander around aimlessly in computing. His success was with Pixar, not with NeXT. The only reason NeXTStep was superior to Apple's other options is that they had been dicking around incompetently with a variety of OS projects which never went anywhere. It's also not clear that NeXTStep was actually a better option than BeOS, but it's cleat that Jobs and NeXT were a package deal, and the rest is history.
The fact that NeXTStep, an overpriced and antiquated wacky Unix variant based around a development system and language nobody wanted to use at the time was superior to MacOS of the day is a testament to how aimless and pointless Apple was without Jobs, not to the quality (or success) of NeXTStep.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"