“This is almost embarrassing, but I actually want to say really nice things about someone: Steve Jobs, CEO simultaneously of Apple Computer and Pixar Animation Studios… I began thinking about all the things that Steve Jobs has brought to computing. It’s remarkable, and more apparent now than ever,” writes Stewart Alsop for Fortune. “In the past month Jobs has unveiled the iTunes Music Store with Apple and Finding Nemo with Pixar. The music initiative required Jobs’ visionary personality to get the record labels over their deep fears of distributing music online. At the same time Jobs’ vision of making popular movies has been so successful that Pixar is now in a position to negotiate mano a mano with Walt Disney Co., which is worth more than ten times as much and generates 100 times as much revenue.”
“It’s just the latest step in creating things that people can’t help but like. So in the spirit of iTunes Music, here is my list of what I consider to be Jobs’ greatest hits,” Alsop writes.
Read the full article here.
He has not batted 1.000, but he’s damn close. He took an almost dead Apple computer, transitioned it a completely different operating system, launched the iPod, the Apple Stores, etc and now stands poised to see the “summer of Mac”.
This summer will see or have seen the arrival of the new 970 based CPU, a new 64-bit version of OS X, new iPod, the new iTunes Music service, release of Safari 1.0, a new AppleWorks, a new PowerMac Line and I’m betting a version of iTunes for Windows before summer is over.
All this while heading Pixar, another Fortune 500 company. Also remember that much of the change-over and development of all these new goodies was accomplished during a recession and tech-depression. Bravo, a job well done. I doubt anyone else could have had the vision, confidence, and personal leadership ability to have pulled all this off at Apple.
Oh yeah you forgot to mention that Michael Dell would have killed it (Apple) if he was CEO. I guess he felt that incompetent. *snicker* Such a wuss with no “vision”.
I doubt that we’ll see iTunes for windows by the time summer is over. jobs said it wouldn’t be done until the end of the year.
I hate to point this out, but there’s never really been a time when there was an “almost dead” apple.
I can remember rumours of Apple “going out of business next year.” before there was a macintosh.
back in the 90’s I saw it expressed most aptly on a tagline:
“Apple: celebrating 20 years of ‘going out of business next year.'”
Jobs has many brilliant ideas, usually coupled with stupid ones.
the original mac couldn’t be upgraded. at all. the engineer responsible for making it possible to cut a resistor and add more RAM was fired.
Gates is quoted as saying “640K is enough.” for Jobs in the original Mac, 128K was enough.
That said, can you imagine where apple would be now, if (as it was in the beginning) there was someone just above Jobs to take all his brilliant ideas and implement them, whilst simultaneously making sure the stupid ones never see the light of day?
hopefully, the 970 will be that machine.