As usual, it’s OK if you’re Apple | Ed Bott
Hmmm. What can we conclude from this example?
- If Microsoft delivers a 170MB update to its customers based on more than two months of feedback from enterprise customers and hardware partners, it is a sign of incompetence.
- If Apple delivers more than 700MB of updates in the same period of time based on complaints from its customers, it is awesome.
Welcome to Silicon Valley.
I highly recommend this article (via NewMexiKen). A great read.
Steve Jobs’ Real Genius : The New Yorker
The Tweaker The real genius of Steve Jobs.
by Malcolm Gladwell November 14, 2011
In the nineteen-eighties, Jobs reacted the same way when Microsoft came out with Windows [as he did later to Google and Android]. It used the same graphical user interface—icons and mouse—as the Macintosh. Jobs was outraged and summoned Gates from Seattle to Apple’s Silicon Valley headquarters. “They met in Jobs’ conference room, where Gates found himself surrounded by ten Apple employees who were eager to watch their boss assail him,” Isaacson writes. “Jobs didn’t disappoint his troops. ‘You’re ripping us off!’ he shouted. ‘I trusted you, and now you’re stealing from us!’ ”
Gates looked back at Jobs calmly. Everyone knew where the windows and the icons came from. “Well, Steve,” Gates responded. “I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”
Jobs was someone who took other people’s ideas and changed them. But he did not like it when the same thing was done to him. …
Perhaps this is why Bill Gates—of all Jobs’s contemporaries—gave him fits. Gates resisted the romance of perfectionism. …
It’s true that Gates is now more interested in trying to eradicate malaria than in overseeing the next iteration of Word. But this is not evidence of a lack of imagination. Philanthropy on the scale that Gates practices it represents imagination at its grandest. In contrast, Jobs’s vision, brilliant and perfect as it was, was narrow. He was a tweaker to the last, endlessly refining the same territory he had claimed as a young man.
Note that Jobs and Apple have no significant history of philanthropy. And that Gates saved Apple with cash and by bringing Office to the Mac.
As for a detail in the article itself: I like a stylus and it makes far more sense than a finger for many tasks. A tablet should support both.
What Everyone Is Too Polite to Say About Steve Jobs By Ryan Tate
One thing he wasn’t, though, was perfect. Indeed there were things Jobs did while at Apple that were deeply disturbing. Rude, dismissive, hostile, spiteful: Apple employees—the ones not bound by confidentiality agreements—have had a different story to tell over the years about Jobs and the bullying, manipulation and fear that followed him around Apple. Jobs contributed to global problems, too. Apple’s success has been built literally on the backs of Chinese workers, many of them children and all of them enduring long shifts and the specter of brutal penalties for mistakes. And, for all his talk of enabling individual expression, Jobs imposed paranoid rules that centralized control of who could say what on his devices and in his company.
What Everyone Is Too Polite to Say About Steve Jobs [hat tip to Ed Bott]
This is worth a read.
Armed and Dangerous » Blog Archive » On Steve Jobs’s passing
[E]ven while Jobs was posing as a hip liberator from the empire of the beige box, he was in fact creating a hardware and software system so controlling and locked down that the case couldn’t even be opened without a special cracking tool. The myth was freedom, but the reality was Jobs’s way or the highway. Such was Jobs’s genius as a marketer that he was able to spin that contradiction as a kind of artistic integrity, and gain praise for it when he should have been slammed for hypocrisy.
Armed and Dangerous » Blog Archive » On Steve Jobs’s passing
I’m no fan of Apple, but Jobs was a giant and a brilliant marketer. (Jobs was a geek; Gates is a nerd.)
Steve Jobs in His Own Words – John Paczkowski – News – AllThingsD
“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful, that’s what matters to me.”
Steve Jobs in His Own Words – John Paczkowski – News – AllThingsD
Pictures: Steve Jobs Dead – Remembering Steve Jobs | EveryJoe
Bill Gates Remembers Steve Jobs – Ina Fried – News – AllThingsD
Bill Gates, the man who was both a partner and rival to Steve Jobs during his long career at Microsoft, called working with jobs “an insanely great honor” and said he would miss the Apple founder “immensely.”
Bill Gates Remembers Steve Jobs – Ina Fried – News – AllThingsD
Had my first experience with Kinect (and Xbox) today. Crude and clumsy, but a vision of what lies beyond touch. Why touch something if it understands your gestures and voice? Although I never bet against Apple, Microsoft could move decisively ahead with a gesture- and voice-friendly OS that works on any device with a camera or mic. Hello, Windows 8!
Q: I’m unable to sync music to my iPod Classic using Windows Media Player. What am I doing wrong?
A: As you have discovered, the iPod isn’t compatible with Windows Media Player, as is. This has something to do with competition between Apple and Microsoft and their methods for protecting digital content.
There is an option that I haven’t tested, so I can’t make any promises about it. See this Web address http://www.mgtek.com/dopisp/ for information on a plug-in that claims to add the features you want to Windows Media Player. The plug-in costs $19.95, although you can install it and try it for free for 30-days.
An alternative is to use a different program than Windows Media Player. There is Apple’s own iTunes (http://www.apple.com/itunes/), as well as, MediaMonkey (http://www.mediamonkey.com/), and SharePod (http://www.getsharepod.com/).
How to Change the Logon Background in Mac OS X – How-To Geek
Bored of the staid, old login background that greets you every time you log into your Mac? Here’s how to customize the wallpaper image to anything you want with just a couple of quick steps.
We’ll start off by showing you how to manually change the background image, and then how to use a simple application to change the image.
How to Change the Logon Background in Mac OS X – How-To Geek
