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Posts tagged ‘Jobs.’

Mar 5

The trouble with Steve Jobs

A friend of mine pointed me to an interesting article about the personality traits/flaws of Steve Jobs and the impact, both real and imagined on the stockholders of Apple (for purposes of disclosure, I am a stockholder). The article is worth reading and raises several issues germane to the issue of disclosure to shareholders. The core issue is summarized in the prologue:

Jobs likes to make his own rules, whether the topic is computers, stock options, or even pancreatic cancer. The same traits that make him a great CEO drive him to put his company, and his investors, at risk.

My reaction is typical of these pieces. The author, Peter Elkind, is a typical investigative journalist who has never sat behind a desk as an executive of a publicly traded company and endured the kind scrutiny he forces on others. He of course, has the advantage of hindsight to assist him as he passes judgment on decisions made by executives with less than perfect information.

It will be interesting to see if Jobs in another case of a celebrity (in this case a celebrity executive) built up by the media only to be torn down. I guess this would be the second time for Jobs.

read more

Oct 31

Goodbye Myrio

Myrio Logo

Dear friends and colleagues,

As I depart Nokia Siemens Networks (Myrio was acquired in 2005 by Siemens and is now subsidiary of Nokia Siemens Networks), today marks the end of an era for me–11 amazing years.

When we started working on the technologies that became Myrio, we had a
dream that one day companies all over the world would be delivering TV
services over IP. We were certainly not clairvoyant enough to predict how,
what is now called IPTV, would develop over the coming years, but we knew
the power of Internet combined with entertainment would create amazing new possibilities. Although IPTV seems so “well duh” now, this was not the case–even just 5 years ago.

I want to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you for
believing in Myrio and the possibilities it created. We could not have done
it without you!

In 2005 Steve Jobs gave the commencement speech at Stanford.

Full text:

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

Youtube:

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I want to share a short excerpt from that speech. He said, “You’ve got to
find what you love. [sic]. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life,
and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great
work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you
haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the
heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it
just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you
find it. Don’t settle.”

Myrio and IPTV have most certainly been a labor of love.

As I sign off, I extend my best wishes to all of you.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.

-ryan

Oct 23

The Map Just Changed

Green Apple Logo
Today, Apple’s market cap exceeded that of IBM. Apple finished the day at $186.16 giving it a market cap of $161.89B (IBM’s market cap is at $156.01B). Makes you wonder about Apple’s 1984 Ad.

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Over at bbum’s weblog-o-mat he has created a graph showing the relative market caps for the leading computer hardware companies.

Over at SilliconValley.com, they point out,

And while Google-watchers go gaga over its soaring share price (see “A six-letter word for bubble? Try gasbag“), note that an investor who bought Apple on the same day Google stock debuted in 2004 would have, as of the close of market yesterday, made 40 percent more than if the same money had been put into the search sovereign’s shares.

Congratulations to Mr. Jobs and the entire Apple team on this truly amazing occasion!

May 31

D5: Gates and Jobs together

At this years All Things Digital Conference D5, hosted by the Wall Street Journal, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were on stage together in a “fireside” interview with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. This coming together was billed as one of the great events of all the D: conferences and in my view it was every bit as good as its billing.

Highlight clip:

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There were so many great moments, that it is difficult to single any out without artificially reducing the rest. However, in the audience Q&A section, they were asked about things they had learned in building their companies. I thought Jobs answer was extremely insightful. He said,

People say you have to have a lot of passion for what you’re doing and it’s totally true. And the reason is because it’s so hard that if you don’t, any rational person would give up. It’s really hard. And you have to do it over a sustained period of time. So if you don’t love it, if you’re not having fun doing it, you don’t really love it, you’re going to give up. And that’s what happens to most people, actually. If you really look at the ones that ended up, you know, being “successful” in the eyes of society and the ones that didn’t, oftentimes, it’s the ones [who] were successful loved what they did so they could persevere, you know, when it got really tough. And the ones that didn’t love it quit because they’re sane, right? Who would want to put up with this stuff if you don’t love it?

So it’s a lot of hard work and it’s a lot of worrying constantly and if you don’t love it, you’re going to fail. So you’ve got to love it and you’ve got to have passion and I think that’s the high-order bit.

The second thing is, you’ve got to be a really good talent scout because no matter how smart you are, you need a team of great people and you’ve got to figure out how to size people up fairly quickly, make decisions without knowing people too well and hire them and, you know, see how you do and refine your intuition and be able to help, you know, build an organization that can eventually just, you know, build itself because you need great people around you.

Here are the pertinent links:

Transcript: http://d5.allthingsd.com/20070531/d5-gates-jobs-transcript/

RSS: http://d5.allthingsd.com/feed/

Complete video set:
http://d5.allthingsd.com/20070530/video-steve-jobs-and-bill-gates-prologue/