No more magic: How Tim Cook botched Jobs’ product-launch formula. When T. Boone Pickens Told Big Oil To 'Take This Job And Shove It' 7 Business Mistakes Serial Entrepreneurs Never Make (Twice) The 100 Best Corporate Citizens. America's Most Reputable Companies. First-Time Manager? How to Fast-Track Your Education. Apple was falling fast a decade ago. Now it's reached the top of the tree | Technology | The Observer.
Steve Jobs may once have said "It's more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy", but Apple's status as an outsider is long gone. Last week, Jobs's company completed its long journey from underdog to top dog when it briefly overtook oil giant Exxon Mobil to become the largest company in the world by market capitalisation. As the price of oil tumbles amid fears of a new recession in western economies, Apple appears immune. Sales of iPads and iPhones are unstoppable. Silicon is now bigger than oil, at least when it comes in an Apple casing. For several hours on Tuesday, Apple surpassed Exxon as the most highly valued company, at one point by as much as $7bn (£4.3bn).
The US oil company had reasserted itself by the end of the day, closing at a capitalisation around $1.5bn higher, but on Friday morning they traded places again, with Apple peaking at a value of $351bn, and Exxon bottoming at $350bn. We have been here before with technology stocks. Things hardly improved overnight. Google's Business Strategy: Have No Business Strategy | Co. Design. [This is the second in a three-part series of excerpts from Tim Harford's new book. The first excerpt was "Why Do We Hold Fast To Losing Strategies? "] Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt had a surprise when he walked into Larry Page’s office in 2002. Page is the co-creator of Google and the man who gave his name to the idea at the company’s foundation: its PageRank search algorithm.
But Page had something rather different to show Schmidt: a machine he’d built himself which cut off the bindings of books and then scanned their pages into a digital format. Page had been trying to figure out whether it might be possible for Google to scan the world’s books into searchable form. Managers stay out of the way. Larry Page regarded the time he devoted to the project not as something he could do because he was Google’s founder and could do whatever he wanted, but as something to which he was entitled because every engineer at Google had the same deal. A serial innovator such as Google or W.L. 5 things I learned at VMworld — Cloud Computing News.