iheartapple2:
(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.
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.
digg:
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.”
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.”
Steve Jobs, when trying to lock up a Samsung flash memory deal in 2005, according to sources who spoke with Reuters for their piece on the Apple/Samsung relationship.
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?