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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 According to Steven Levy soon after the deal with HP was inked, Apple upgraded the iPod, making HP's version outdated and because of Fiorina's deal HP was banned from selling its own music player until August 2006.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.
on Windows.
HP didn't want to enter the music player gizmo biz, otherwise they wouldn't do the iPod deal to begin with. And not having Microsoft's music spam-ware on HP's PC's didn't hurt HP, it hurt Microsoft.
The only way it would hurt HP is if MS was contractually locked out from bribing HP to put the MS spam-ware on the HP PC's. But we don't know how much MS was willing to pay.
Table-ized A.I.
What was the Corvalis Group going to do? Keep making really nice but rather expensive, calculators for an ever dwindling market? It's not a sustainable product line that could scale today to be anything but a nostalgia product. Besides which, the HP calculators have a high enough build quality that if you really need one you can track one down used for a price that is about the same as you'd pay, inflation adjusted, for a new one. There's nothing new to be added. Your HP-41, 48, or 15 is out there to acquire if you need it, for the few who want one.
Well, she was outfoxed.
The PJB-100, the first disk-based MP3 player, was in my hands in 1999 - a full two years before the iPod. HP owned fundamental patents that could have taxed each unit that Apple sold - but seemed to be entirely unaware of that ownership.
Instead, they paid Apple to resell their own inventions. Brilliant!
So yeah, she just totally sucked.
You lost me at Jobs being innovating.
Don't get me wrong, he was one hell of a salesman (On top of being a swindler when it came to the wages of the rank and file workers due to an illegal non-poach agreement) but I haven't seen anything innovative come out of apple since the 1980's. Absolutely everything I saw him sale was stuff others had invented.
He was about as inventive as a box of rocks for over 2 decades before his death.
Captcha: Blonde.....
A presidential candidate's demonstrated incompetence in a leadership position is "stuff that matters". So is major corporate executive's, since it helps dispell the lingering idea that leaders get paid more than underlings because they're worth more, rather than just more powerful. The remains of the myth of the divinely appointed kings are hindering our democracies by making the decision-making positions extremely attractive to psychopaths, narcissists and people with other mental issues, and need to die.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Considering how far (R) has shifted to the right since the 80's the party would immediately declare the Ghost of Ronald Reagan to be a Dem.
That is logically sound, indeed Reagan is too liberal to be a republican. However one of the unshakable requirements for republicans is to praise him regardless; and they are not bothered by the hypocrisy (indeed they don't even acknowledge it). So while they should throw him out for being too liberal, they would be unable to bring themselves to do so.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.