Well its up to Apple to prove him wrong isn't it, we can huff and puff, but wtf's the use?
The burden of proof is on the side making the claim. One should not be allowed to make unproven statements and demand the other side to "prove him wrong."
Whatever. Ellison and Jobs were great friends and by all accounts each would take a bullet for the other. His comments demonstrate his loyalty to Steve, that's all.
Does this tells us something about Steve Jobs people skills?
The only thing that is bigger than Larry Ellison's ego is his boat. No wonder he has a hard time accepting that there's other smart people on the planet, besides himself.
I think the current management team at Apple is brilliant. Each of them in their own way, but brilliant, and dedicated.
Did he not advise Steve Jobs not come back to Apple?
Even if Apple were to lose its mojo so be it!
I love Apple products and this planet earth has natural circle of birth and death. People and companies, success and failures included. No company or an entity succeeded for centuries together. It is a natural process.
This executive team still has fire in the belly and I hope/expect them to gradually lose out by next ten or so years, which is completely fine. If Apple finds ownership mentality people, that will be great otherwise they may stay afloat like IBM or Sony or even a bit better than them.
The Apple is doomed because Jobs is gone logic is strange. It only works if, he was both a genius who was single handedly responsible for Apple's success. and at the same time completely inept at doing the thing he cared about most; building a great company, and building it to last.
It's like looking at a bunch of fish on the deck of a trawler flapping around madly; all vehemently denying their situation is still rosy.
Shakespeare as usual nailed it "the lady doth protest too much, methinks". There's another one about shooting messengers.
I personally don't think Apple is doomed, I think it has passed it's peak, though, unless Steve's hinted at solution to the living room TV 'problem' is actually still in the works. In defence of Cook, people trot out several recent Apple products like the iPad mini, iPhone 5 and iOS 7 and Mac Pro, but these are all derivative and are just evidence of Apples momentum.
I am astonished at all those belittling Steves' contribution and achievements. It's like he's the new Woz, who people here like to look down their noses at so condescendingly.
Larry Ellison was paying Steve the greatest of possible compliments. I doubt Steve would disapprove or bare any ill feeling towards him for them.
Cook can maintain Apple as a steady-state, prosperous company, but he won't be able to grow it through astonishing innovation as happened under Jobs, unless Ive is more of a dark horse than I think.
No Larry what you saw in the 90s was Apple being managed by the type of people others use now. Fortunately after trying a few if these what I call 'spreadsheet managers' they were let go in the 'reshuffle' and at least one admitted he was not a good fit to the Apple mold. What you forget is jonny Ive has designed the iMac before the return of Steve only for the then management to store it away because it was too radical for them. If the new Mac Pro is anything to go by the current leadership team won't be making that team which is hardly surprising as Jobs picked them himself.
Even though I love n miss Steve Jobs. What I see is the people he left behind him, the way in which they announce & talk products.
Some will say just marketing! You can never get that marketing Apples got. I'm still eager watching every keynote, the companies run, finances, design n development. Each one of these people Tim, Jonathan , Graig, Philip & Eddy plus all others under them were - are a team that was also under Steve.
Steve brought these persons into Apple for a reason the more important thing is the Brainstorming that goes on for the concept, creation, design of each product!
Even so when Apple is attacked daily in many ways just has it was when Steve was there.
We saw Apple toss out Steve Jobs and go down the crapper. We are now seeing Steve Jobs create an infrastructure of culture reflecting his ideals for Apple that took 13 years to build before he passed on.
The talent at Apple from vision to raw technical merit dwarfs anything Larry ever experienced at Oracle or prior to Oracle working for a company developing film for NASA. The culture permanent.
The best response at this point is it is impossible to predict. But I can promise you Steve wouldn't have let those iOS 7 home screen icons out the door. Not that Jobs was perfect or always right; he most certainly was not.
The best response at this point is it is impossible to predict. But I can promise you Steve wouldn't have let those iOS 7 home screen icons out the door. Not that Jobs was perfect or always right; he most certainly was not.
No you can't promise anything. Things like the hockey puck mouse, flower power and dalmatian iMacs came out on Jobs watch. It's so annoying these days that whatever someone doesn't like they claim Steve wouldn't have allowed it.
The Apple is doomed because Jobs is gone logic is strange. It only works if, he was both a genius who was single handedly responsible for Apple's success. and at the same time completely inept at doing the thing he cared about most; building a great company, and building it to last.
You bring up a good point here. I'd love to see Larry answer that one.
We saw Apple toss out Steve Jobs and go down the crapper. We are now seeing Steve Jobs create an infrastructure of culture reflecting his ideals for Apple that took 13 years to build before he passed on.
The talent at Apple from vision to raw technical merit dwarfs anything Larry ever experienced at Oracle or prior to Oracle working for a company developing film for NASA. The culture permanent.
Steve made sure of it.
I was waiting for you to weigh in on the matter (post #37). Your opinion is much more valued, to me, than Larry Ellison's. Since Steve and he were such friends, I think his opinion is more biased than yours.
If he were a true friend of Steve's he'd have sufficient confidence in the company Steve built to last beyond Steve's personal existence.
To say that Apple is going down without Steve is on one hand saying he didn't know how to build a company, and it was only held together by Steves dictatorial tendencies and everyone's fear of his tantrums, and on the other hand devaluing the true genius of the people at Apple.
Most things Apple made weren't Steve's ideas, it was other people's ideas Steve decided to run with. The one thing that was typical "Steve" was to recognize that quality even if it costs more, drives demand in its own right. i.e. that saving a buck on each computer by using cheap materials doesn't result in more profit, because while it seems to increase the profit margin, it hurts overall sales. But these are insights everyone who hasn't their brains destroyed by a "business career" and some MBA program can have.
Steve's biggest asset was, that he didn't go to business school and didn't have to brown-nose and conform his way up the corporate ladder, which is why no company will ever have a CEO like Steve: not because there are not plenty of other Steve's around, but because no company has the guts to hire a guy like Steve, and instead they all go for the "safe" choices with an MBA and "years of experience", rather than for the crazy creative guy (and then put a good COO on his side).
"So really, what Apple does is deliver the ideas and concepts from about 35-40 years ago, made consumer friendly by modern hardware."
Maybe you just made a poor choice of words but 'ideas and concepts' are great only to a point. They don't add real value to the world until they can be delivered in a practical manner. Execution matters more. Apple is really damn good at execution; they bring good ideas to life and they do it with great integrity and craftsmanship. Oracle is basically the opposite. Their craftsmanship is almost non-existent, except perhaps in their core DB product. They excel, however, at buying existing product and making it worse. Actually what they excel at is selling and extracting large maintenance fees.
Actually, perfect choice of words. The problem with ideas and concepts is that one has to "get it". How difficult that seems to be was evident e.g. when NeXT (thanks to the news-worthiness factor of Jobs) put the spotlight on OOP/OOL. All of a sudden everyone was also going to be object oriented: Java, C++, Taligent, Cairo, blah, blah. None of them conquered the world in any significant way (besides modestly so Java), because they all didn't understand what OOP was really about: it's not about classes, it's about dynamics.
C++ is a class based language, but it's not an object-oriented language (a term clearly defined by Alan Kay to include a fully dynamic runtime system). So because people didn't get the idea of OOP/OOL, they couldn't deliver.
The closest thing to a decent rip-off was Java, but even that took many iterations of the language with features piled upon features to finally arrive at a resonably dynamic system. In the process of course, the idea of write once deploy everywhere was lost, so was any consistency in APIs, or for that matter even the security (just about all severe security issues in OS X have lately been either Java or Flash related).
So even Java fell flat on its face, even though it's powering a bunch of enterprise stuff, and in mutated form, Android. In that sense, the wanna-be-but-can't-quite nature of Android vs. iOS perfectly mirrors the same relationship between Java and NeXTSTEP aka Cocoa/iOS/OSX
It is the ideas and concepts that matter, but without a proper understanding of these, one can't deliver them. Apple, under the pressure of marketing, the desire to dumb things down (often beyond where it makes sense), and due to integration with a variety of legacy infrastructure doesn't get all the concepts and ideas right, either (less so than NeXT did), but in the grand scheme of things, they are doing a significantly better job than anyone else in this industry.
Until someone with massive financial backing "gets it" better than Apple does, Apple is a safe bet, with or without Jobs. And frankly, with the type of "business" leadership all the other companies have, where CEOs couldn't even really explain their own technology or eco system beyond using the buzzwords the marketing department cooked up, the chances of that happening are pretty darn slim in the foreseeable future.
(And don't bet on the next generation: gadget savvy is not the same as technology savvy... Computer literacy seems to be going down, now up, Apple with it's oversimplified interfaces unfortunately one of the culprits. The promise of computers was that with the same mental effort, we could go further. Now, it's all about doing the same or less, but with less mental effort (i.e. letting our brains rot instead of challenging them). It's all about EZ (remember "easy" is too difficult to spell), not about expanding the capabilities of the human mind.
Apple once had a phrase for their educational marketing: "Computers - wheels for the mind" (picture a brain on a bicycle or F1 car) Unfortunately, today it has turned into "Computers - wheelchairs for the mind" (picture a rotting brain slumped on a wheelchair))
Comments
But…But…Samsung
Quote:
Originally Posted by murman
Well its up to Apple to prove him wrong isn't it, we can huff and puff, but wtf's the use?
The burden of proof is on the side making the claim. One should not be allowed to make unproven statements and demand the other side to "prove him wrong."
Friends with Larry Ellison...
Does this tells us something about Steve Jobs people skills?
The only thing that is bigger than Larry Ellison's ego is his boat. No wonder he has a hard time accepting that there's other smart people on the planet, besides himself.
I think the current management team at Apple is brilliant. Each of them in their own way, but brilliant, and dedicated.
Did he not advise Steve Jobs not come back to Apple?
Even if Apple were to lose its mojo so be it!
I love Apple products and this planet earth has natural circle of birth and death. People and companies, success and failures included. No company or an entity succeeded for centuries together. It is a natural process.
This executive team still has fire in the belly and I hope/expect them to gradually lose out by next ten or so years, which is completely fine. If Apple finds ownership mentality people, that will be great otherwise they may stay afloat like IBM or Sony or even a bit better than them.
haha. for real.
The Apple is doomed because Jobs is gone logic is strange. It only works if, he was both a genius who was single handedly responsible for Apple's success. and at the same time completely inept at doing the thing he cared about most; building a great company, and building it to last.
It's like looking at a bunch of fish on the deck of a trawler flapping around madly; all vehemently denying their situation is still rosy.
Shakespeare as usual nailed it "the lady doth protest too much, methinks". There's another one about shooting messengers.
I personally don't think Apple is doomed, I think it has passed it's peak, though, unless Steve's hinted at solution to the living room TV 'problem' is actually still in the works. In defence of Cook, people trot out several recent Apple products like the iPad mini, iPhone 5 and iOS 7 and Mac Pro, but these are all derivative and are just evidence of Apples momentum.
I am astonished at all those belittling Steves' contribution and achievements. It's like he's the new Woz, who people here like to look down their noses at so condescendingly.
Larry Ellison was paying Steve the greatest of possible compliments. I doubt Steve would disapprove or bare any ill feeling towards him for them.
Cook can maintain Apple as a steady-state, prosperous company, but he won't be able to grow it through astonishing innovation as happened under Jobs, unless Ive is more of a dark horse than I think.
-please delete-
and dont let me get started on the hot mess that is JAVA.What I see is the people he left behind him,
the way in which they announce & talk products.
Some will say just marketing! You can never get that marketing Apples got.
I'm still eager watching every keynote, the companies run, finances, design n development.
Each one of these people Tim, Jonathan , Graig, Philip & Eddy plus all others under them
were - are a team that was also under Steve.
Steve brought these persons into Apple for a reason the more important thing is the
Brainstorming that goes on for the concept, creation, design of each product!
Even so when Apple is attacked daily in many ways just has it was when Steve was there.
Well said.
Who cares!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dickprinter
Quote:
Originally Posted by mdriftmeyer
We saw Apple toss out Steve Jobs and go down the crapper. We are now seeing Steve Jobs create an infrastructure of culture reflecting his ideals for Apple that took 13 years to build before he passed on.
The talent at Apple from vision to raw technical merit dwarfs anything Larry ever experienced at Oracle or prior to Oracle working for a company developing film for NASA. The culture permanent.
Steve made sure of it.
I was waiting for you to weigh in on the matter (post #37). Your opinion is much more valued, to me, than Larry Ellison's. Since Steve and he were such friends, I think his opinion is more biased than yours.
If he were a true friend of Steve's he'd have sufficient confidence in the company Steve built to last beyond Steve's personal existence.
To say that Apple is going down without Steve is on one hand saying he didn't know how to build a company, and it was only held together by Steves dictatorial tendencies and everyone's fear of his tantrums, and on the other hand devaluing the true genius of the people at Apple.
Most things Apple made weren't Steve's ideas, it was other people's ideas Steve decided to run with. The one thing that was typical "Steve" was to recognize that quality even if it costs more, drives demand in its own right. i.e. that saving a buck on each computer by using cheap materials doesn't result in more profit, because while it seems to increase the profit margin, it hurts overall sales. But these are insights everyone who hasn't their brains destroyed by a "business career" and some MBA program can have.
Steve's biggest asset was, that he didn't go to business school and didn't have to brown-nose and conform his way up the corporate ladder, which is why no company will ever have a CEO like Steve: not because there are not plenty of other Steve's around, but because no company has the guts to hire a guy like Steve, and instead they all go for the "safe" choices with an MBA and "years of experience", rather than for the crazy creative guy (and then put a good COO on his side).
Quote:
Originally Posted by David Andersen
Quote:
"So really, what Apple does is deliver the ideas and concepts from about 35-40 years ago, made consumer friendly by modern hardware."
Maybe you just made a poor choice of words but 'ideas and concepts' are great only to a point. They don't add real value to the world until they can be delivered in a practical manner. Execution matters more. Apple is really damn good at execution; they bring good ideas to life and they do it with great integrity and craftsmanship. Oracle is basically the opposite. Their craftsmanship is almost non-existent, except perhaps in their core DB product. They excel, however, at buying existing product and making it worse. Actually what they excel at is selling and extracting large maintenance fees.
Actually, perfect choice of words. The problem with ideas and concepts is that one has to "get it". How difficult that seems to be was evident e.g. when NeXT (thanks to the news-worthiness factor of Jobs) put the spotlight on OOP/OOL. All of a sudden everyone was also going to be object oriented: Java, C++, Taligent, Cairo, blah, blah. None of them conquered the world in any significant way (besides modestly so Java), because they all didn't understand what OOP was really about: it's not about classes, it's about dynamics.
C++ is a class based language, but it's not an object-oriented language (a term clearly defined by Alan Kay to include a fully dynamic runtime system). So because people didn't get the idea of OOP/OOL, they couldn't deliver.
The closest thing to a decent rip-off was Java, but even that took many iterations of the language with features piled upon features to finally arrive at a resonably dynamic system. In the process of course, the idea of write once deploy everywhere was lost, so was any consistency in APIs, or for that matter even the security (just about all severe security issues in OS X have lately been either Java or Flash related).
So even Java fell flat on its face, even though it's powering a bunch of enterprise stuff, and in mutated form, Android. In that sense, the wanna-be-but-can't-quite nature of Android vs. iOS perfectly mirrors the same relationship between Java and NeXTSTEP aka Cocoa/iOS/OSX
It is the ideas and concepts that matter, but without a proper understanding of these, one can't deliver them. Apple, under the pressure of marketing, the desire to dumb things down (often beyond where it makes sense), and due to integration with a variety of legacy infrastructure doesn't get all the concepts and ideas right, either (less so than NeXT did), but in the grand scheme of things, they are doing a significantly better job than anyone else in this industry.
Until someone with massive financial backing "gets it" better than Apple does, Apple is a safe bet, with or without Jobs. And frankly, with the type of "business" leadership all the other companies have, where CEOs couldn't even really explain their own technology or eco system beyond using the buzzwords the marketing department cooked up, the chances of that happening are pretty darn slim in the foreseeable future.
(And don't bet on the next generation: gadget savvy is not the same as technology savvy... Computer literacy seems to be going down, now up, Apple with it's oversimplified interfaces unfortunately one of the culprits. The promise of computers was that with the same mental effort, we could go further. Now, it's all about doing the same or less, but with less mental effort (i.e. letting our brains rot instead of challenging them). It's all about EZ (remember "easy" is too difficult to spell), not about expanding the capabilities of the human mind.
Apple once had a phrase for their educational marketing: "Computers - wheels for the mind" (picture a brain on a bicycle or F1 car) Unfortunately, today it has turned into "Computers - wheelchairs for the mind" (picture a rotting brain slumped on a wheelchair))