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Posts tagged with "steve jobs"

Steve Jobs Is “Back to the Jet”

Steve Jobs is back in the air. Well not the Air (which apparently is doing great), but literally in the air with his private jet. Taking a look at Apple’s 10K form for fiscal year 2010, Fortune noticed a $93,000 reimbursement to Steve Jobs for private jet expenses in Q4 2010, namely fuel and pilot salaries.

Private jet expenses accounted to only $12,000 in Q3. Clearly Steve traveled a lot during the last quarter, and we can only speculate about the people he met and the deals he closed.

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Steve Jobs Was “Furious” Over Microsoft’s Bungie Acquisition

For those of you not familiar with the videogame industry: the blockbuster series Halo for Xbox and Xbox 360 is developed by Bungie, a company Microsoft acquired in 2000 to make Halo: Combat Evolved a launch title for the original Xbox. In 2007, Bungie became a privately held company; then earlier this year Bungie announced a 10-year publishing deal with industry giant Activision Blizzard.

According to a report published by Develop,  Steve Jobs was literally “furious” when Microsoft announced they had acquired Bungie in 2000, and called Steve Ballmer as soon as he learned about the deal. Read more

So This Would Be Steve Jobs’ Business Card in 1979

Business cards used to be simpler, and even Steve Jobs used to have one. This comes straight from the 1979 archives, discovered by a couple of techies somewhere in California.

Mozilla Labs director and tech-enthusiast Pascal Finette photographed Jobs’ groovy card after a colleague brought it into the office. According to Finette, Apple still uses the phone number seen on the card, but don’t give it a ring thinking you’ll get a direct line to Steve.

I can confirm that number is still active, but it’s definitely not Steve’s number anymore. As Finette also reports (but you can’t notice by the photo), Steve wanted an embossed Apple logo in the business cards.

“Integration” As A New Way To Define iOS

In case you missed it, Steve Jobs made a surprise appearance at today’s Apple Q4 earnings call. What he had to say about 7-inch tablets, Android, Nokia, RIM and Apple’s philosophy is all over the internet. You can read a full transcript here.

Reading between the lines, what strikes me is the focus Steve put on the word “integrated”. The iOS platform is integrated, Android is fragmented. With the iPhone, you get an integrated device. You don’t have to mess with hundreds of different devices running multiple versions and variations of the Android OS. But that’s not really the point, we get Steve’s thoughts on Android. Tweetdeck’s developers get them even more.

What interests me is the use of the term “integrated” as a new way of defining iOS, and thus the devices is runs on, against competitors. By definition, to integrate means to “combine two or more elements so that they become a whole”. So it’s clear that, in Jobs’ mind, Apple deeply integrated the hardware with the software to create a new, reliable, user-friendly experience. Read more

Complete Transcript Of Today’s Steve Jobs Statements→

Complete Transcript Of Today’s Steve Jobs Statements

This one pretty much sums it all up:

Nokia makes $50 handsets, and we don’t know how to make a great smartphone for $50. We’re not smart enough to have figured that one out yet, but believe me I’ll let you know when we do. And so our goal is to make really breakthrough great products, make the best products in every industry that we compete in, and to drive the cost down while constantly making the products better at the same time. That’s what we did with iPod. We updated our products many times every year with better functionality, often times at same price and sometimes at a lower price. And it was the relentless improvement at in some cases a lower price, that was able to beat our competition and yield the market share that it did.

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At Apple’s Q4 Earnings Call, Steve Jobs’ Rant Sets The Record Straight

So here’s what happened: at the Q4 earnings call Steve Jobs grabbed the mic and started talking. No one expected Steve Jobs to be available at the conference, because Steve Jobs doesn’t usually attend earnings calls.

But it happened, and he went on a 10-minute long “rant” where he set the record straight about overly discussed arguments such as Google’s openness, Android’s sales numbers, Apple’s App Store and closed system and the rumored 7-inch iPad form factor. He’s still taking questions at the moment of writing this. Read more

Steve Jobs: We still have a few surprises left for 2010

Apple CEO Steve Jobs, in the press release for Apple Q4 financial results:

We are blown away to report over $20 billion in revenue and over $4 billion in after-tax earnings—both all-time records for Apple. iPhone sales of 14.1 million were up 91 percent year-over-year, handily beating the 12.1 million phones RIM sold in their most recent quarter. We still have a few surprises left for the remainder of this calendar year.

A few surprises left might mean a new MacBook Air on Wednesday, or a CDMA iPhone (that runs on Verizon) announcement before the end of the year. Or maybe something entirely new, such a 7-inch iPad model? What about a complete MobileMe revamp?

Truth is, with $20 billion revenue in the last quarter they can pull out whatever surprise they want.