"I Had Four CEOs!"
Speaking of prison terms, Josh Topolsky scored an interview with Jon Rubinstein on his way out of the door from HP.
Rubinstein tries — and fails — to hold back his contempt for the past few HP regimes. It reads like he and fellow HP VP Todd Bradley had a grand plan (this one, perhaps?) for HP/webOS that disintegrated when then-CEO Mark Hurd was ousted. That, of course, kickstarted months of turmoil and turnover, highlighted by the disastrous Leo Apotheker reign (which didn’t even last a year).
The notion that Rubinstein’s exit was planned all along sure smells like total bullshit.
Best part of the interview:
There were things that didn’t work out the way everyone expected — can you talk about what caused the issues?
I don’t think it really matters at this point. It’s old history at this point.
You don’t want to talk about Leo?
Nah. We built an amazing OS in webOS. It’s very advanced, it’s where things are going. But we ran out of runway, and we ended up at HP and HP wasn’t in good enough shape on its own to be able to support the effort. I had four CEOs! Mark acquired us, Les Jackson took over as the interim CEO, then Leo, and now Meg.
“Nah.”
While Rubinstein says he’s going to take some time off, he’s not retiring. Given the bad blood in recent years, I wouldn’t expect him back at Apple anytime soon. But remember, he is still an Amazon board member — and Amazon is pushing deeper into hardware…
Ruby Released
Jon Rubinstein, the former CEO of Palm (and former Apple executive), has left HP.
With Palm hardware now dead and webOS now open-sourced, the writing has been on the wall for this to happen for a while. To hear HP tell it, this was the plan all along. As Arik Hesseldahl writes:
Rubinstein is said to have no immediate plans, and had completed a 12-24 month commitment to stay with HP after the acquisition. “Jon has fulfilled his commitment and we wish him well,” HP spokeswoman Mylene Mangalindan said.
Sounds almost like a prison term.
This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
A lot of people have asked for my take on The New York Times piece yesterday about the true cost of making Apple products in China. Let me first just say that it’s an important piece full of good reporting by Charles Duhigg and David Barboza. Parts of it are very sad — sickening, really.
But let’s be honest. The post focuses on Apple because Apple is now arguably the most successful company on the planet. If they were, say, the 8th largest computer manufacturer, they probably wouldn’t have even been mentioned. Again, that’s not to say it shouldn’t have been written — it absolutely should have — but it’s important to keep that in mind.
The real key here is that this story could have been written about any number of technology companies that have to deal with hardware manufacturing. This sad state of affairs is the way the world works in this space. Anyone who thinks otherwise is naive.
Does that excuse Apple’s behavior in some situations? Not at all. But there also isn’t enough background here to know if Apple is even the worst enabler of these poor working conditions. That’s sort of implied a few times in the piece, but never fully backed up.
My TechCrunch colleague Devin Coldewey wrote a great response to the piece. As he writes:
Something the article only fleetingly acknowledges is that Foxconn is used by most of the major electronics brands in the world. Samsung, Microsoft, Amazon, and the rest all contract with Foxconn to manufacture, assemble, or finish their products. The threatened mass suicide the other week was, in fact, at an Xbox production facility.
And later:
So it has never been a surprise to me when I hear that Apple, and others, only do so much to change the situation in factories and factory towns in China. The simple fact of it is they’re not the ones at the reins. Foxconn and China have our all-important tech companies by the scruff of the neck, and bear the big bad audits by Apple (more likely by people representing people representing Apple) like they’d bear a kitten swiping at their face. It’s a high stakes game, and Foxconn and its like hold all the cards.
That’s something important that the NYT never addresses. The situation is decidedly more complicated than Apple simply turning a blind eye.
While this report brings such an issue to the forefront, similar pieces and stories surface quite frequently, actually. Guess what changes? Nothing. It’s shitty to say, but it’s the truth. And we all know it.
The fact of the matter is that we live in a world that demands amazing technology delivered to us at low costs and at great speed. That world leads to Foxconn.
We say we care about the means by which the results are reached when we read stories such as this one. But then we forget. Or we chose not to remember. We buy things and we’re happy that they’re affordable. And then we buy more things. And more. With huge smiles on our faces. Without a care in the world.
Samsung's Q4: $4.7 Billion In Profit
In other words, they’re the bizarro-Motorola.
Or, put another way, in order to acquire such a company at the market price Google sets, it would take something like $14 trillion.
Why Not Try An Infinity-Day Window?
Matt Drance on Warner Bros. idiotic new 56-day DVD rental window:
Also under this new deal, pirated movies remain free of charge, free of non-skippable ads, free of five-minute load times, and are now nearly three months ahead of the competition.
And:
iTunes changed the music industry because it was more convenient than stealing. Most people made the value judgment that ten bucks for a clean, legal digital album was worth the alternative of fishing around for files that may or may not be damaged or infected.
It’s really — honestly — surprising that Hollywood doesn’t understand such a simple concept. Even stranger is that they can look to the music industry as an example and learn from the mistakes there, but they refuse.
Hollywood isn’t going to die anytime soon — but it won’t be from lack of trying. The pain is coming. In a big way.
What $12.5 Billion Buys You These Days
Motorola warned their Q4 numbers would be bad. And boy are they ever. A rundown:
They shipped — shipped, not sold — 5.3 million smartphones in the quarter. As a reminder, Apple sold 37 million.
For the full year, Motorola shipped — shipped, not sold — 18.7 million smartphones. As a reminder, Apple sold 37 million smartphones last quarter.
They shipped — shipped, not sold — 200,000 tablets last quarter. TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND. As a reminder, Apple sold 15 million tablets.
For the year, Motorola shipped — shipped, not sold — 1 million tablets. As a reminder, Apple sold 15 million tablets last quarter.
The company lost $80 million in the quarter — $70 million of that was by the mobile division. The unit lost $285 million for the year.
This is a company that Google is buying for $12.5 billion.
Sanjay Jha is a wizard.
AT&T Punishes Its Customers For T-Mobile Merger Failure
GigaOm’s Kevin Fitchard:
After blasting the Federal Communication Commission for “picking winners and losers” in the wireless industry by scrutinizing every deal, Stephenson claimed AT&T is now in a mobile capacity-constrained environment which has forced it to raise prices and manage connection speeds (aka throttle) for its highest volume subscribers.
As I wrote back in December:
I suspect their next move will be a lot of complaining that the government is now the reason why they’re so inept…
Total jackasses.
Android Keeps On "Winning"
AT&T says that 7.6 million iPhones were activated last quarter, and 9.4 million smartphones overall were sold. Impressive numbers, but be careful.
As Eric Slivka of MacRumor notes, this doesn’t necessarily mean that 7.6 million of the 9.4 million smartphones sold were iPhones because “activated” can include older devices given away or sold through a third-party.
Still, AT&T says the “majority” of iPhone activations were of the iPhone 4S (which was new). And it’s probably safe to assume that overall, the vast majority of the activations were sales. If that is indeed the case, that means the iPhone outsold all Android phones combined on AT&T’s network.
AT&T does say that they set a sales record for Android devices (as they did with iPhone). But they only give the vague, Amazon-like: “more than twice as many Android smartphones were sold versus the fourth quarter a year ago”.
AT&T’s statement reads a lot like, “we love you too Android, we just love iPhone more”.
Phase two of the reboot of J.C. Penney by former Apple SVP Ron Johnson is decidedly more optimistic than phase one.
(via Observatory)
Why We Gloat

5 years ago, I made a bet. Two bets, actually.
The first was with myself. I bet myself that if I devoted serious time to it, I could become a great technology blogger. It wasn’t an easy bet to make. I knew it would require upending my life at the time. And it did.
The second bet was related to the first. I knew that to become a key tech blogger, I would need a focus. As a relatively new Mac user myself, I decided that focus would be Apple. Yes, I was coming later to the party than some, but Apple was still a company at the time that was scoffed at by many. But drawing from my own experience, I truly felt that the company was on the cusp of changing the world. Again.
“Hundreds” Of Schools In 41 States Use Chromebooks
Better than “dozens”, I suppose.
The Street Blows At Predicting Apple Part 2,383
Philip Elmer-DeWitt breaks down how analysts — both Wall Street and independent — did in guessing Apple’s lastest insane quarterly numbers.
Check out his spreadsheet at the bottom of the page. You’ll note that almost all of the green is at the top (Independent analysts) while most of the red is at the bottom (Wall Street analysts). Hendi Susanto of Gabelli & Co. should get a special award — he actually believed Apple’s revenue would be below even Apple’s own guidance (that never happens).
To me, there are two really crazy things about this spreadsheet (which says all you need to know about how good Apple’s quarter was):
1) No one — not one analyst — predicted a number above Apple’s actual revenue. The closest one was still well over a billion dollars off.
2) Earnings Per Share and Gross Margin were even crazier. No one was close on either.



