Tag: Macintosh

Jobs’ off switch

Steve Jobs hated the on-off  switch. Perhaps more so because it was a relic of electricity (Edison) and automobile manufacturers (Ford). He did not like old wine in the same wineskin, given our always-on Cloud Service in  A/C data centers.

Apple chose North Carolina as a site to store music, video and the rest of its customers’ files. The FCC recently allowed the roll-out of White Space, wi-fi on steroid, also in NC.

Who needs the on/off switch! It had some utilitarian legacy (activate and deactivate) when hardware used to rule.

Now, software eats your lunch.

Of BMW’s  thousand components, a large portion are software-controlled. From Buggy to Beamer, the engineers have made a giant leap.

Jobs was quoted as saying (this was counter-intuitive and anti-academic):

“if Ford had asked the customers what they wanted, they would have said,

faster buggies”.  In short, it’s categorically different with revolutionaries.

Think different!

No on/off switch.

Just the dial.

Circular motion.

The experience economy.

Control the product from end-to-end to make every touchpoint with the customer an iSee! (Disneyland).

Progress , like time, waits for no man.

If you keep standing on the track, you will likely get run over.

Not a single word in Jobs biography states directly that he was a  futurist. Yet he could intuitively sense what was coming – his biography itself was well orchestrated (momenti mori) and ironically open-sourced (counter-culture life style, but proprietary business model).

In fact, religious zealots did take a shot at him for his views.

I wonder if those people secretly borrow an I-pad from friends to touch and feel (where is the on/off switch?).

I wonder what their legacies are as opposed to Jobs’?

And their destination : paradise or purgatory?

Jobs took his son to a business meeting (antennaeGate) mostly for I-phone IV damage control . “It would be a two-year worth of Business School  education” said he.

His biography, which offers more than a two-year worth of B-school, is a must-read for technologists, marketers and culture critics who want to understand the Valley ethos.

When arts (music in this case) found new venue (I-pod) and revenue (I-Tunes), it is unchained melody for the mass (unbundled as singles not whole album).

Be spoiled with IT 3.0 (cloud and social media) but also be thankful sitting on giants’ shoulders

An image evokes in my mind was that of Cinema Paradiso, where the kid got a ride home on the bike’s frame, wearing his mentor’s hat and chatting up as a fee for the ride. However long, enjoy the ride. That’s our reward . As Southwest Airlines would say, please collect your items to ensure faster turn-around at the gate.

Apple in my eyes

 

Everybody loves a winner.

Today’s is Apple, starts with the “A” in the alphabet.

Not bad for a college drop-out who then learned calligraphy, hung out with “evangelist” Kawasaki, forced out then came back to the tune of billions. He embodied the “I” in I-phone.

I remember my first encounter with personal computers, and of course, it was a Mac.

Silicon Valley back in the early 80’s was brimming with S Asian programmers;  the Vietnamese-American community were working 2 or 3 shifts a day as assemblers (before the offshore trend).

You got to have a garage: garage band, garage sale, and start-up in garage. It’s cool to be in a garage, although it was meant for cars.

In California, you don’t freeze to death by sleeping in a garage, unlike in the cold Winter of the Northeast. Thus, it allows for start-up mindset and venture capitalist, risk takers, trend setters or just drifters.

You definitely find yourself there, because to go further West (young man), you will have to fly to Hawaii.

The best you can do is driving North, through Red Wood, onto Portland and Seattle.

Meanwhile, South of SF is sufficed.

It will keep you busy “coding” for a while.

What Steve Jobs brought to the business world is his signature turtle neck and a little bit of rebellious streak.

Meanwhile, he doesn’t mind to surround himself with the likes of Kawasaki, long before having an Asian partner becomes a hip (Yahoo, YouTube).

People of the Valley are not only Californians, but also tribal members of the Tech world. You don’t talk shop, you talk Tech. You are not the Man, you’re the Burning Man.

I remember attending a speech by Armstrong when he became CEO of AT&T. And having been at various start-ups

such as MCI and Teligent, I had a nagging feeling that you could not fake “coolness”.  In other words, you cannot be both the old IBM (blue suit) and the new new thing (like Apple). The elephant cannot walk.  Sure enough, after some “reality checks”, IBM sold off the hardware division to Lenovo to pursue the higher margin world of convergence and Cloud, while AT&T back then sold off NCR and other assets.

I admired the crowd Apple stores were able to draw in.

Apple takes it to the mass, at a boutique level, and bridges the gap between high-tech and high touch.

It’s been a long way since 1976 garage days. A lot of Chinese take-outs, brainstorming and risk taking.

It’s really tough to be number 1. Now the hard part is to stay King of the Hill. Apple in the post-Jobs era. Gotta Think Different this time.