Howdy, I'm MG Siegler. I’m a general partner at Google Ventures and a columnist for TechCrunch. This is where I collect things.
Some selected works. Some haikus. Some investments. Ask away.
Showing 94 posts tagged steve jobs
(1999) Steve Jobs Introduces The World to WiFi
Just look at that response over something we take completely for granted now just 14 years later.
Love the camera man over-the-shoulder as the way to show it on the big screen.
And the hula hoop — look ma, no wires! — is just a brilliant, Steve Jobs touch.
![[via @cap]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/374ef6e987b4d9dcd90d0b8e0bc9a7e6/tumblr_mm8a20ACFB1qz4gevo1_500.jpg)
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[via @cap]
Steven Levy interviewed Ray Kurzweil about his new role at Google. On the topic of having the courage to follow your convictions:
Levy: What’s the biological basis for that kind of courage? If you had an infinite ability to analyze a brain, could you say, “Oh, here’s where the courage is?”
Kurzweil: It is the neocortex, and people who fill up too much of their neocortex with concern about the approval of their peers are probably not going be the next Einstein or Steve Jobs.
The Life Of Steve Jobs, Rendered As An Old-School Mac Desktop
This interactive online memorial, rendered as a pixel-perfect simulation of the original Macintosh OS, separates Jobs’ life into folders, with each milestone presented as its own program.
Tree On Pixar Campus Dedicated To Steve Jobs
April 1, 1976: Apple is Founded
On this day in 1976, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne founded Apple, a business dedicated to selling personal computers.The three founders worked in Jobs’ parents’ garage and developed their first product, Apple I. The following July, Apple introduced 200 personal computers to the market and sold them for $666.66.
Throughout the years, Apple has gained its title as a global leader in the consumer electronics industry due to its iconic products such as the iPhone, iPod, iMac, and iPad.
In 2011, the world had to say goodbye to Apple’s leading force - Steve Jobs. Take a moment to remember the life of Steve Jobs with PBS NewsHour’s special report.
Image (from top to bottom): Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs (Tony Avelar/Bloomberg via Getty Images), An early Apple Macintosh computer c. 1981 (Bertrand LAFORET/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
No joke.
(via iheartapple2)
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Another throwback: The internet in 1995
NYT journalist John Markoff shows how he uses “electronic mail” and opens up an email from Steve Jobs.
Oh you know, just this dude Steve who won’t stop emailing me.
Also, why does this video seem more like it was taped in 1985? Time really is compressing.
“Hey, Bob, I saw the movie you just released last night, and it sucked.”
Steve Jobs, as recalled by Disney CEO Bob Iger.
The entire Bloomberg Businessweek piece about how and why Disney bought Lucasfilm is great. Iger doesn’t get nearly enough credit yet, but he will. In a way, he reinvented and as a result, saved Disney.
“But if you could buy dollar bills for 80 cents, it’s a very good thing to do.”
Warren Buffett, talking on CNBC about what Apple should do with its cash.
Interesting that the advice he gave to Steve Jobs about the cash a few years back was to buy back some Apple stock. Jobs obviously didn’t do that. Now Apple has an insane amount of cash.
Or, in Buffett terms: “They may have too much cash.”
“Whoever controls flash is going to control this space in consumer electronics.”
One more link to Michal Lev-Ram’s story on Samsung for Fortune to highlight this tidbit:
In the late 1960s Samsung officially entered the electronics business. In the early years the company was known for cheap televisions and air conditioners. That all changed in 1995, when its chairman (and the elder Lee’s son), Kun-Hee Lee, paid a momentous visit to the company’s plant in Gumi, a factory town in south-central Korea. Legend has it that the younger Lee had sent out the company’s newest mobile phones as New Year’s presents and was horrified when word came back that they didn’t work. Later, at Gumi, he made a giant heap of the factory’s entire inventory and had it set on fire.
That’s how you send a message. It reminds me of this Steve Jobs quote:
When I got back here in 1997, I was looking for more room, and I found an archive of old Macs and other stuff. I said, ‘Get it away!’ and I shipped all that shit off to Stanford. If you look backward in this business, you’ll be crushed. You have to look forward.
Austin Carr for Fast Company looks back at the project that started as “The Netflix Player” but was eventually spun out into the Roku box/company:
It was December 2007, and the device was just weeks away from launching. Yet after all the years and resources and talent invested in the project (a team of roughly 20 had been working on it around the clock, from ironing out the industrial design and user interface to taking trips to Foxconn to finalize production details), Netflix CEO Reed Hastings was having serious second thoughts. The problem? Hastings realized that if Netflix shipped its own hardware, it would complicate potential partnerships with other hardware makers. “Reed said to me one day, ‘I want to be able to call Steve Jobs and talk to him about putting Netflix on Apple TV,’” recalls one high-level source. “‘But if I’m making my own hardware, Steve’s not going to take my call.’”
In hindsight, good call.
And:
But ultimately, Wood says, “It was totally the right decision. Licensing [digital content] has been hugely successful for Netflix. [The Netflix Player] would’ve created tension with partners, and increasingly decisions would come up where Netflix would have to decide, ‘Should we make decisions based on what’s best for licensing, or what’s best for our own hardware?’”
Sounds eerily similar to the dilemmas that both Google (with Motorola) and Microsoft (with Surface) now face, no?
