NYTimes profiles Steve Jobs, offers speculation on Apple's ...

[MacBytes]

Category: News and Press Releases
Link: NYTimes profiles Steve Jobs, offers speculation on Apple\'s WWDC product releases (http://www.macbytes.com/link.php?sid=20040425160138)
Posted on MacBytes.com (http://www.macbytes.com)

Approved by Mudbug

[SuperChuck]

Here we go again with the Apple tablet and cell phone rumors. Only now the speculation comes from the paper of record. It's nice to see a Mac Rumor in the pages of the Times. :)

[aswitcher]

Category: News and Press Releases
Link: NYTimes profiles Steve Jobs, offers speculation on Apple\'s WWDC product releases (http://www.macbytes.com/link.php?sid=20040425160138)
Posted on MacBytes.com (http://www.macbytes.com)

Approved by Mudbug


"Mr. Jobs, however, does not appear to be banking on that happening. Instead, he is betting on his ability to rapidly replicate the iPod's success by creating a string of digital consumer product categories. "

Really...


"WHAT new products will be unveiled? No one outside this famously secretive company may know for sure. But because Mr. Jobs has been so publicly critical of tablet computers and hand-held video players, some outsiders have suggested that Apple may choose to offer a Macintosh-style interactive television system for the living room, competing with Media Center PC's, designed by Microsoft and Intel, and with the PSX video game and digital video recorder, soon to be released by Sony. "

New screens with built in digital tuners ;)
iTV, to manage it :eek: :p


"Last year, the company quietly added two new wireless standards, known as 3GPP and 3GPP2, to its QuickTime software for sending and receiving multimedia over digital cellular networks. Because Apple was an early leader in the Wi-Fi market with its airport wireless networking base station, the reasoning goes, the company may be hard at work on a line of digital mobile phones that would take the company into the fast-growing voice-over-Internet-protocol, or VoIP market."

Coupled with a telco or two and a mobile manufacturer, they could go far (creating lots of rumors, speculation and arguments here ;) )

[LimeiBook86]

I liked that article a lot. I hope for some cool new PDA. My Treo 90 died on me and I refuse to pay a load of money to simply have the company replace it. Go Apple Handhelds!! <pulls out Newton MP130> :D

[J-Squire]

Anyone feel like posting the article?

[J-Squire]

I wonder what this internet service was that they were going to set up. I'm sure it would have only been available in the US anyway. :(

[crees!]

Anyone feel like posting the article?

Agreed.. I wouldn't mind reading the article too.

[wdlove]

"WHAT new products will be unveiled? No one outside this famously secretive company may know for sure. But because Mr. Jobs has been so publicly critical of tablet computers and hand-held video players, some outsiders have suggested that Apple may choose to offer a Macintosh-style interactive television system for the living room, competing with Media Center PC's, designed by Microsoft and Intel, and with the PSX video game and digital video recorder, soon to be released by Sony."

I think that this would be a very interesting addition for Apple. An iTV innovated by Steve! :cool:

[SuperChuck]

Although a subscription to the NYTimes is free, very useful and has never been used to SPAM me, I have copied and pasted the article here:

Oh, Yeah, He Also Sells Computers
By JOHN MARKOFF

STROLL the corridors and the atriums on Apple Computer's corporate campus these days and you will notice that something is missing. Gone are the posters and graphics accenting the company's sleek personal computers. In their place, in the main lobby, is a striking, three-story-high billboard celebrating Steven P. Jobs's brand-new billion-dollar consumer electronics business - the iPod digital MP3 music player.


In just two and a half years, Mr. Jobs, Apple's chief executive, has managed to take a well-designed hand-held gadget, add software connecting it to Macintoshes and Windows-based personal computers and convince the recording industry that he has found an elegant solution for ending its nightmare of digital piracy. In doing so, he has shifted the emphasis of Apple from what made it famous - hip, even lovable computers - to what he hopes will keep it relevant and profitable in the future: products for a digital way of life.


In fact, the wild success that Mr. Jobs has enjoyed with the iPod may have come in the nick of time. For all the acknowledged design and ease-of-use advantages of the Macintosh, Apple's overall PC business is still growing more slowly than that of its Microsoft- and Intel-based competitors.


Moreover, it was obvious at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January that a horde of consumer goods and computing companies is preparing a fresh assault aimed at bringing computerized gadgets into every nook and cranny of the home. In particular, two powerful Apple rivals, Sony and Microsoft, are betting that Mr. Jobs is wrong when he says, "It's about the music!" This year, both companies plan to release more expensive, hand-held combination video and audio players that their executives hope will blow the iPod away.


So will Apple eventually be overwhelmed by its bigger, better-heeled competitors? Throughout the technology world, there seems to be a simple, uniform answer to that question: Never underestimate Steve Jobs.


With roots both in Silicon Valley's digital culture and the 1960's counterculture, Mr. Jobs has long been an arbiter of what is cool in technology, much like a real-world version of a trend-spotting character from "Pattern Recognition," one of the cyberpunk novels by William Gibson.


AND, helped by his growing prominence in Hollywood through his second company, Pixar Animation Studios, Mr. Jobs has attained a level of influence over how life is lived in the digital age that is unmatched by even his most powerful computer industry rivals. "He is the Henry J. Kaiser or Walt Disney of this era," said Kevin Starr, a culture historian and the California state librarian.


Since returning seven years ago to Apple, the computer maker he helped to establish in 1976, Mr. Jobs has created a fusion of fashion, brand, industrial design and computing. He has opened a chain of 78 retail stores to showcase Apple's consumer-oriented designs and to surround the company's computers with an array of digital consumer products. The stores themselves have become another billion-dollar business, a feat all the more impressive considering that one of Apple's chief competitors, Gateway, failed with a similar retail strategy during the same period.


As a result, Apple is acting less like a computer company and more like brand-brandishing, multinational companies such as Nike and Virgin. The iPod's success is also the clearest indication that Mr. Jobs, if he is to successfully revamp Apple, will ultimately win not by taking on PC rivals directly, but by changing the rules of the game.


The Apple that is starting to emerge may be a harbinger. The company's growth may no longer be defined by its PC market share, now a declining sliver of the PC industry, but instead by Mr. Jobs's ability to create consumer markets.


Mr. Jobs, who says he has a 70 percent share of the market for legal music downloads and a 45 percent share of the MP3 market, sees the shift as sweet vindication. "We're getting a chance to see what Apple engineering and Apple design can really do once we get out from underneath the 5 percent Macintosh operating system share," he said.


To some people in the industry, Mr. Jobs, of late, has even outshone his old nemesis, Bill Gates of Microsoft - not in market share, of course, but in innovation. "Both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs arrived with the idea of digitizing the world, but Gates has lost his way," said George F. Colony, the chief executive of Forrester Research, a computer industry consulting firm. "Despite all of his warts, Jobs has kept the dream alive, whether it's movies, music or photos. I call him the digitizer."


Two striking figures in Apple's most recent quarterly financial results, announced on April 14, underscore Mr. Jobs's new approach. In the last three months, Apple sold 807,000 iPods, surpassing for the first time the number of Macintosh computers it sold (749,000). At the same time, revenue for products other than Macintoshes reached 39 percent of the total of $1.91 billion for the quarter, more than double the percentage two years ago.


"It's fascinating that the company is morphing into something else," said Charles R. Wolf, a Wall Street analyst at Needham & Company, adding, "Jobs is absolutely brilliant in understanding consumer products."


In fact, throughout his career, Mr. Jobs has been notable as much for the products he has resisted selling as for the ones he has pursued. During the mid-80's, after his falling-out with John Sculley, the former PepsiCo executive he hired in 1983 to run Apple, Mr. Jobs resisted repeated proposals from young Macintosh engineers to join them in efforts to create hand-held digital devices that would ultimately become the Newton and General Magic projects. It would be a wise decision, for both Newton, the personal digital assistant, and General Magic, a similar hand-held computer, proved to be ahead of their time, and neither led to successful consumer products.


Several years ago, Mr. Jobs said in an interview last week, the company was ready to introduce Apple-branded Internet service. Two weeks before the launch he killed the idea because he had decided it wasn't a viable business.


More recently, Mr. Jobs has been publicly skeptical about tablet computers and hand-held video players. And executives familiar with the history of the iPod design effort said that he initially was not in favor of making the iPod compatible with Windows-based computers. Obviously, he came around - and, as a result, the company will probably never be the same.


People who know Mr. Jobs well say he disdains strategic thinking as it is practiced by large corporations. Several people who have worked with him describe his business approach as "instinctual."


Underscoring that point, when he returned to Apple in 1997, Mr. Jobs contacted every consulting firm that had major contracts with Apple, according to a person familiar with the events. One by one, he called in the firms' directors, asked for a review of their work, thanked them and then told them their services would no longer be needed.


It has become apparent that the way Mr. Jobs designs products has changed fundamentally during his second tour of duty. In creating the iPod, the iTunes Macintosh and Windows software and the iTunes music store, Apple has not just designed products; it has also designed a business system. That may help explain why, almost three years into Mr. Jobs's foray into digital music, his major competitors are still playing catch-up, or, as in the case of Hewlett-Packard and Time Warner, have decided to ally with him.


Mr. Jobs's recent approach to product development is a radical change from the past. He once said his goal was to become an "industrialist." In his early years at Apple and at Next, the computer company he founded after he left Apple in 1985, he spent much time leading development efforts with hardware and software. In both cases, he built automated factories in Silicon Valley.


BY contrast, Apple says it developed the iPod in just six months, faster than any major product in the company's history. The hand-held device, which contains more computing power than an early Macintosh, was put together starting in 2001 by hardware designers led by Tony Fadell, a young engineer who had worked at the Apple spinoff General Magic, at Philips Electronics and briefly at RealNetworks, led by Rob Glaser, who has developed the Rhapsody music service.


In the late 1990's, Mr. Fadell tried to start his own Silicon Valley company, Fuse, designing consumer electronics products, including some related to digital music. When Fuse failed to get financing, he went to Apple, first as a contractor in February 2001, and then in April that year as the senior director of the iPod and other special projects.


He would eventually build a 35-member team of engineers from Apple and other companies. Using a version of a microprocessor that powers most cellphones, the group brought the iPod together rapidly by relying on software licensed from a small start-up, Pixo, a cellphone software company founded by Paul Mercer, another former Apple engineer.

[SuperChuck]

Article Part Deux:

Since Mr. Jobs returned to Apple, he has increasingly insisted that the company speak with just the voices of top executives, so Mr. Fadell was not permitted to comment for this article. But Mr. Fadell's decision to go to Apple instead of staying at RealNetworks may come to be regarded as a turning point in the digital music battle.


RealNetworks had been trying to develop consumer electronics products based on the company's RealPlayer software program. Mr. Fadell, however, lasted only six weeks at the company because, his friends said, he did not see eye to eye with Mr. Glaser, the chief executive. As a result, several former Apple employees suggested, Mr. Glaser might have allowed an iPod-like hit product to slip through his fingers.

Despite iPod's success, skeptics say Mr. Jobs's digital music venture will not be enough to offset a flagging performance in the PC business. "The success of the iPod doesn't seem to have significantly changed Apple's market share," said T. Michael Nevens, a director at both Borland Software and Broadvision and the former director of McKinsey & Company's technology consulting practice. And Mr. Nevens said that there was "no support for the theory" that the new digital appliances would bolster computer sales.


Mr. Jobs, however, does not appear to be banking on that happening. Instead, he is betting on his ability to rapidly replicate the iPod's success by creating a string of digital consumer product categories.


In Silicon Valley, where speculation about what Mr. Jobs may do next is a favorite spectator sport, the betting is that the company is preparing to introduce such an effort in July at its World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco.


WHAT new products will be unveiled? No one outside this famously secretive company may know for sure. But because Mr. Jobs has been so publicly critical of tablet computers and hand-held video players, some outsiders have suggested that Apple may choose to offer a Macintosh-style interactive television system for the living room, competing with Media Center PC's, designed by Microsoft and Intel, and with the PSX video game and digital video recorder, soon to be released by Sony.

But another avenue is more likely, according to several people close to the company. Mr. Jobs is legendary for being idiosyncratic and unwilling to follow industry trends. Wouldn't Apple's co-founder want to avoid the crowded market for digital entertainment products, they suggest, and turn his laser focus on a mobile digital communications product?


Last year, the company quietly added two new wireless standards, known as 3GPP and 3GPP2, to its QuickTime software for sending and receiving multimedia over digital cellular networks. Because Apple was an early leader in the Wi-Fi market with its airport wireless networking base station, the reasoning goes, the company may be hard at work on a line of digital mobile phones that would take the company into the fast-growing voice-over-Internet-protocol, or VoIP market.


But if that is Apple's strategy, Mr. Jobs isn't saying. After all, surprise is at the heart of all the company's marketing campaigns, and who would expect less from the man who once rented San Francisco's symphony hall to introduce a new computer? Even for Mr. Jobs and Apple, some things remain the same.

[snahabed]

What can Apple bring to the market that elgato cannot? Tivo, Replay, and every new cable box has much of this functionality. Do people really want ANOTHER device in their home theatre setup?

I think that if Jobs really wanted integrated TV tuners in Macs, we would have had them by now. Technology has been there for years.

The internet telephony is interesting, but I don't really know how all that works outside of the home, if at all (what, one has to find a wifi hotspot to make a call?).

So who knows what they are coming up with!

[bertagert]

Cnet (http://news.com.com/2100-1041_3-5199499.html?tag=nefd.top) has the article fo free.

I think the wi-fi phone would be cool. However, I don't see Apple going that route. Let me think a little more and get back to you guys on my predictions.

[Sol]

Considering that the Media PC was a response to the Digital Hub I find it silly that people expect Apple to release a Media PC-like product for recording television. I would rather see Apple focus on their desktop and portable computers by upgrading their motherboards for G5 processors and Serial ATA drives.

[aswitcher]

Considering that the Media PC was a response to the Digital Hub I find it silly that people expect Apple to release a Media PC-like product for recording television. I would rather see Apple focus on their desktop and portable computers by upgrading their motherboards for G5 processors and Serial ATA drives.


What if Apple could do for Digital LCD TV what they did for home computers, back in the day? Everyone has a TV, and most of the little people still have CRTs because Plasma and LCDs are to expensive. If Apple come out with a nicely featured Digital LCD TV for the right price, they worked seemlessly as a good resolution computer screen as well as a SDTV, I think they would have a winner. This is going to happen some day, Apple (with the likes of LG etc) could be the ones to really push the multifeature easy to use BIG TV/Computer screen...

[Sayer]

If you want to access the articles on the New York Times website just use this account info (it's not mine and was made publicly available for just this purpose):

Account/login name: jaysonblair200

Password: nytsux

It's still up to you to find all the factual errors that go uncorrected for weeks at a time, however.

[Mr.Hey]

I think the wi-fi phone would be cool. However, I don't see Apple going that route. Let me think a little more and get back to you guys on my predictions.

One of the main reasons Steve said that Apple would not be producing an iPhone device is because of the difficulties in dealing with service providers--service providers was his main gripe--that they would make it too difficult and costly for Apple and was ultimately the deciding factor.
So he decide a good compromise was instead to begin supporting these devices on OS X by create iSync. But now with this new technology, it essentially cuts out the middle man (baby bells) making it less complicated and a more viable option for Apple. I personally think it has to mature a bit more before Apple decides to jump in.