Joel Drucker: Steve Jobs -- Does the Ends Justify the Means? Having just finished reading Walter Isaacson's engaging biography of Steve Jobs, I am struck yet again by our country's twisted values. We cherish education. Parents spend thousands for a polished college application essay. But we lionize college dropouts -- at least those like Jobs who make lots of money.
We admire integrity, crave it in our leaders and are disappointed when they steal or cheat. But why does wealth make unethical behavior acceptable? Education and integrity I'll leave to others. My entire business career has been spent in Northern California, often dipping my toes into Silicon Valley. Does the ends justify the means? Having written a biography and dozens of profiles, I know a skilled biographer must see the world through the subject's eyes. Ironic, paradoxical, tragic -- use any term you like to describe how it was that Jobs built products for the masses but so often treated individuals with contempt. I digress. Here is what Edward R. Internal Affairs: Steve Jobs' menu choices vetoed by White House. By the Mercury News Posted: 10/30/2011 12:15:24 AM PDT0 Comments|Updated: 2 years ago Steve Jobs, known as the brilliant dictator of Apple, was overruled by the White House when he tried to pick the menu for the dinner Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr hosted for President Barack Obama in February.
As detailed in Walter Isaacson's new authorized biography, "Steve Jobs," Jobs objected to the planned meal of shrimp, cod and lentil soup because it was "too fancy. " In particular, he told Doerr to nix the dessert of cream pie with chocolate truffles. Doerr, though, made other accommodations for Jobs, who died Oct. 5. According to Isaacson, Obama was annoyed with Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers for pushing a proposal that would allow companies like his to avoid tax payments on overseas profits if they brought them back to the United States for investment during a certain period. The world, though, will never know what a Jobs' political advertising campaign would look like.
Public pays tribute to Steve Jobs at Apple stores | Apple. From one coast to the other, ordinary men and women bowed their heads in tribute to a man who changed the technology world in extraordinary ways. Not long after hearing the newsthat Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had died , people at Apple stores stopped to share their reactions. "He was kind of like this generation's John Lennon," said Frank Arico, 58, a software developer visiting San Francisco for the Oracle OpenWorld conference this week. It was a theme that got repeated in conversations with people who knew Jobs as a larger-than-life pop culture icon but felt the loss on a deeper, surprisingly personal level. "Everything that I've made that is important to me was made on some sort of Apple product," said Doc Pop, a 34-year-old iPhone developer who makes camera applications standing near the downtown San Francisco Apple outlet.
Nearby, Molly Haksdoyle , a 35-year-old clothing store owner from Palo Alto, Calif., added that she started crying when the news hit the transom. The 11 Best Steve Jobs Quotes: Remembering The Apple CEO. Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On | Wired Enterprise. Dennis Ritchie (standing) and Ken Thompson at a PDP-11 in 1972. (Photo: Courtesy of Bell Labs) The tributes to Dennis Ritchie won’t match the river of praise that spilled out over the web after the death of Steve Jobs.
But they should. And then some. “When Steve Jobs died last week, there was a huge outcry, and that was very moving and justified. But Dennis had a bigger effect, and the public doesn’t even know who he is,” says Rob Pike, the programming legend and current Googler who spent 20 years working across the hall from Ritchie at the famed Bell Labs. On Wednesday evening, with a post to Google+, Pike announced that Ritchie had died at his home in New Jersey over the weekend after a long illness, and though the response from hardcore techies was immense, the collective eulogy from the web at large doesn’t quite do justice to Ritchie’s sweeping influence on the modern world.
“Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX,” Pike tells Wired. From B to C. Steve Jobs owned 100 black turtlenecks, according to upcoming Walter Isaacson biography | The Cutline. Jobs in 2007. (AP/Markus Schreiber) Commentators and tech-minded eulogists have dissected Steve Jobs' life and legacy since his death last week. Among the most widely discussed Jobs-related icon: the Apple CEO's signature black turtlenecks. Sales of the $175 mock turtleneck that Jobs wore more than doubled in the hours after he died, according to St. Croix, the Minnesota retailer that makes them. (The company said it would donate a portion of the sales to the American Cancer Society.) TMZ, which was among the first media outlets to report the "skyrocketing" sales, ran a slideshow of "CELEBRITIES WEARING TURTLENECKS" the next day in Jobs' honor. So just how many turtlenecks did Steve Jobs own?
According to Walter Isaacson's biography on Apple's former chief, which is being rushed to publication later this month, Jobs had "about a hundred" of the Issey Miyake-designed shirts stacked in his closet. Gawker has the excerpt: Other popular Yahoo! Steve Jobs. Biz-Tech 3.0 - IT Careers - Where Were You When You Heard the News About Steve Jobs? By Tony Kontzer We collectively experience certain sad moments in history that will remain forever embedded in our memories, associated indelibly with whatever activity we were engaged in when we first heard the news.
Today was just such an experience. I was packing up my gear at Oracle's OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, just moments after CEO Larry Ellison abruptly walked off stage at the conclusion of his keynote, when the journalist next to me uttered an ominous "no way. " I asked him what had happened, and he pointed to the Twitter feed on his laptop, which was abuzz with posts about Steve Jobs' death. After a few frenzied moments trying to verify, we saw Twitter posts from Time Magazine, Ars Technica, and blogger Robert Scoble, and we knew it was true.
Steve Jobs, possibly the greatest technology innovator of our time, was dead at 56. I never had the opportunity to meet Jobs, so I don't have a lot of personal insight into the man. What Everyone Is Too Polite to Say About Steve Jobs. [www.youtube.com] Just a note on this subject. Jobs obsessed on US manufacturing when the Macintosh and later the NeXT Computers were first announced. He did everything the company could do to make state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities in the US.
However the competition from the rest of the industry and demand for low-cost devices pushed the company to China where Apple Computer could compete with the rest of the industry. As for Foxconn, they do not exclusively produce for Apple Computer, those facilities produce products for the following companies: Acer, Amazon(Kindle), Asus, Intel, Cisco, HP, Dell, Nintendo, Nokia, Microsoft, MSI, Motorola(Google), Sony Ericsson and Vizo.
Apple Computer increased pressure on their production line partners to improve their conditions and systematically weeded out the ones that failed to improve. For those of you who always complained that Apple Computer products cost too much, this was one of the solutions - ahh the invisible hand of the free market. Steve Jobs Death: Steve Jobs Tribute for the Misfits: To Your Vision, Your Fire, Your Creativity & Those You Moved to Genius...