Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address. The Soul of Apple by Kevin Kelly. This week something unusual happened.
At the very same time that tens of thousands of ordinary citizens were camping out in New York, Washington, and Seattle to protest corporate greed, and the capitalistic wealth of the very rich, a similar number of ordinary citizens were depositing flowers and spiritual offerings at the corporate stores of the wealthiest company in the world (with earnings larger than most countries), in memory of one of the richest people in the world, the late Steve Jobs. Why would a billionaire elicit such affection and love during this moment of fierce dissatisfaction with global capitalism? Because Steve Jobs was a CEO of beauty. In his interviews and especially in private, Jobs often spoke about Art. Taste. Jobs clearly put design and art before money -- and that made his work thrilling. His talents were that he had a designer's eye and the unwavering self-confidence of a genius. If a person can do that once, they are hailed as brilliant.
But that is now. C. Eric Schmidt on Steve Jobs. Everyone knows the transaction where the board sided with John Sculley and Steve left Apple (AAPL).
Steve sold all of his Apple stock, kept one share, and founded NeXT. Typical Steve maneuver. When I was still at Sun Microsystems, I visited him at NeXT—we did a bunch of deals with him. He was exactly the same way he was at Apple: strongly opinionated, knew what he was doing. He was so passionate about object-oriented programming. I should tell you this story. At NeXT he built this platform—a powerful workstation platform for the kind of computing that I was doing, enterprise computing.
Steve Jobs Secret Meeting to Explore an iPod Phone is Revealing. A Historical Account: How the iPod Phone Almost Materialized One of the interesting stories in Walter Isaacson's biography was a recounting of how the iPhone came together and how Apple seriously considered developing an iPod styled smartphone.
The abbreviated story goes like this. In 2005 Steve Jobs started a secret project focused on creating a tablet PC. It came about after Steve Jobs was invited to a dinner for a friend of Laurene Jobs who was turning 50. The birthday boy just happened to be one of the leading engineers over at Microsoft working on the Tablet PC. I guess those were fighting words and so Jobs set up a secret project the following day to design a tablet with no keyboard or stylus (not a smart pen, but a stylus). Isaacson writes that it was such a good idea "that Jobs realized that it could solve the problem they were having creating an interface for the proposed cell phone. Many Revelations Now this is revealing on a number of levels. And One More Thing. What we really owe to Steve Jobs. Apple Computer co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs introduces the all-new flat-panel iMac computer during his keynote speech at the MacWorld Expo in January 2002.
Simon Garfield: New iPhone was introduced without Steve Jobs He says one of Jobs' great accomplishments was popularization of typefacesSuddenly consumers could express themselves through choice of fonts, he saysGarfield: Jobs has been an enduring tech inspiration Editor's note: Simon Garfield is the author of "JUST MY TYPE: A Book About Fonts", published by Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group USA. London (CNN) -- With all the tributes to Steve Jobs, one thing tends to get forgotten: the man helped us write. Jobs was the first to give us a real choice of fonts, and thus the ability to express ourselves digitally with emotion, clarity and variety. He made Type Gods of us all. Simon Garfield And who did Jobs himself thank for this advance? 美國是如何失去了製造iPhone的工作？ 在不久之前，Apple才吹噓自己的產品是在美國生產的。
不過在今天，已經非常地少有了。 在7,000萬台iPhone、3,000萬台iPad以及5,900萬台其他Apple在去年售出的產品中，幾乎所有都是在海外生產的。 總統的問題觸碰到了Apple的核心信念。 這並不只是海外勞工比較便宜的問題。 相反地，Apple高層相信海外工廠的龐大規模以及靈活性、勤奮以及海外工人的產業技術，已經遠遠地超越了他們在美國的同業，讓「美國製造」對於大多數Apple產品來說，已經不再是一個可行的選項。 由於Apple毫不鬆懈地掌控著在全球的營運，讓這間公司已經成為地球上最知名、最受推崇，並且讓其他對手爭相模仿的企業之一。 Apple在美國雇用了43,000名員工，並在海外雇用了20,000人。 但是這700,000人幾乎都不是在美國工作。 一位前任的管理階層敘述Apple是如何在商品上架僅數週前，依靠一家中國工廠來修改iPhone的設計。 根據這位前任管理階層，一位工頭立刻叫起了在宿舍中的8,000名工人。 雖然Apple遠遠不僅止於如此，不過也提供了一個機會，來了解為何一些成功的企業並沒有轉化成大量的國內就業機會。 企業以及其他經濟學者說，這種想法是幼稚的。 為了繼續成長，企業爭辯說他們需要將工作機會移往能產生足夠利潤以支持創新所需資金的地點，否則美國將漸漸隨著時間，面臨著失去更多就業機會的風險。 本文是基於超過三十名現任於前任Apple雇員與承包商的訪談，其中許多人要求匿名以保護他們的工作，包含經濟學家、製造專家、國際貿易專家、科技分析師、學術研究員、 來自Apple供應商的雇員、競爭對手、企業合作對象以及政府官員等等。 Apple管理階層在私底下表示，目前世界已經成為簡單用員工數量來衡量企業貢獻的錯誤狀況。 當時，Apple已經為了代號為「Purple 2」的專案工作超過了兩年，這也顯現出了所有人都會問到的問題──如何才能完全重組一台手機？ 這些問題的答案，幾乎每次都是在美國國外被發現。 在早期，Apple通常並沒有超出自家後院的生產方案。 不過在2004年，Apple已經很大程度地將生產轉移到了國外。 在此同時，亞洲雖然充斥著不熟練的工人，但是由於廉價的勞工而顯得有吸引力。 而對於Cook來說，亞洲被聚焦在兩個重點，一名Apple的前任高階管理人員如此表示。