What Does Jobs’ Departure Tell Us About Apple’s Most Recent Quarter?

Matthew Lynley, Venture Beat, NY Times:

We know Jobs is a shrewd executive. The announcement today was definitely a calculated one. By picking a day when U.S. markets are closed, he’s given traders a day to sit down and get a bit of a reality check about where the company is going now that it will once again be in the hands of chief operating officer Tim Cook. The guy did at least a half-decent job running the company the last time Jobs took a leave of absence, and Apple even tossed him a nice $22 million bonus for his troubles. And the company is readying to release its quarterly earnings report for the holiday season.

You can bet those earnings are going to be stellar.

Apple brought in more than $20 billion its last operating quarter and sold a whopping 14.1 million iPhones in its first full quarter selling the iPhone 4. The company also picked up a nice refresh for its iPods — bringing out a new Nano and a camera-equipped iPod touch that sports the iPhone’s retina display. Holiday sales fared quite well on both the online and retail fronts despite a still-shaky economy.

All in all, Jobs is taking time off at a very good time for the company. The iPad 2 is coming, the next iPhone is coming and Verizon has finally secured the rights to sell the iPhone on its network. Even in cruise control, this is shaping up to be another fantastic quarter for Apple.

Apple Is More Than Just Steve Jobs

Eric Savitz - Tech Musings - Forbes:

While contemplating [the health of Steve Jobs and] whether to sell your shares, keep a few things in mind:

• Apple has been through this before, and the stock has outperformed. During the period Jobs was on medical leave in the first half of 2009, Apple shares actually appreciated about 67%.

• Apple has a deeper bench than many people realize. Tim Cook, the COO, has been here before. For the third time, he takes on more responsibility while Jobs is gone. The Street respects him. The Valley admires him. He is battle-hardened. And let’s not forget that behind Steve is a team that includes industrial designer Jonathan Ive, marketing guru Phil Schiller, iPhone software specialist Scott Forstall and a host of others.

• Apple is simply not a one-man band. We are talking here about a company that in the September 2011 fiscal year could generate more than $100 billion in revenue. Did you think Steve was going to do that by himself?

New York Times Book Review Excludes Black, Latino Critics

BeyondChron: San Francisco's Alt Online Daily News: "The latest example of the sad decline of the New York Times Book Review under editor Sam Tanenhaus is its January 2, 2010 edition on 'Why Criticism Matters' that excludes African-American and Latino critics. Citing the importance of the critic as cultural arbiter, the Times asked six critics to address the subject – none of whom were black or Latino. Further, the back page of the section cites seven cultural critics who inspired the issue’s theme: all seven are white men. We have previously discussed the Book Review’s neo-conservative agenda in its promoting a praiseworthy review of a book unfairly attacking Hampshire College; now it is defining critics as our leading cultural arbiters while ignoring the perspectives of the African-American, Latino and Asian-American critics whose outsider status has often resulted in salient critiques of the elite white culture trumpeted in the Times."

Database of Google Books Shows the Half-Life of Celebrity

arstechnica: "Is it possible to study something as ill-defined as culture in a quantitative manner? Researchers from Harvard have collaborated with Google and some traditional publishers to answer that question with a qualified 'yes.' By leveraging a portion of Google's massive library of digitized books, the team has created what they call a 'culturome,' with which they can track the use of language and terms across hundreds of years. This lets them track not only trends in language and usage, but the rise and fall of celebrities and historic events in the books of many eras. And, thanks to Google, the underlying data has been exposed via a Web interface, allowing others to perform their own analysis."

Tim Berners-Lee: Long Live the Web - A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality

Scientific American, December issue:

The world wide web went live, on my physical desktop in Geneva, Switzerland, in December 1990. It consisted of one Web site and one browser, which happened to be on the same computer. The simple setup demonstrated a profound concept: that any person could share information with anyone else, anywhere. In this spirit, the Web spread quickly from the grassroots up. Today, at its 20th anniversary, the Web is thoroughly integrated into our daily lives. We take it for granted, expecting it to “be there” at any instant, like electricity.

The Web evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles and because thousands of individuals, universities and companies have worked, both independently and together as part of the World Wide Web Consortium, to expand its capabilities based on those principles.

The Web as we know it, however, is being threatened in different ways. Some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles. Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web. Wireless Internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. Governments—totalitarian and democratic alike—are monitoring people’s online habits, endangering important human rights. ...

Ray Ozzie's "Doomsday" Memo re: Microsoft and "The Cloud"

Ozzie is spot-on. But then, that is what he does. Computerworld: "Departing Microsoft executive Ray Ozzie's just-published memo is a 'doomsday-ish' missive that calls on the company to push further into the cloud or perish, an industry analyst said today. Ozzie, who replaced Bill Gates as Microsoft's chief software architect in 2006, is leaving the company, although Microsoft has not disclosed the date of his departure. His 'Dawn of a New Day' memorandum ... is an attempt to focus Microsoft's attention on the day when PCs no longer rule consumer or business computing, said Wes Miller, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, the Kirkland, Wash. research firm that specializes in tracking Microsoft."

What Steve Jobs Learned in the Wilderness

NYTimes.com: "Suppose Mr. Jobs had not left in 1985. Suppose he had convinced the Apple board to oust his nemesis, John Sculley, then chief executive and president. Under Mr. Jobs’s uninterrupted direction, would Apple have arrived at the pinnacle it has reached today, but 12 years earlier? It’s hard to see how anything like that would have transpired. The Steve Jobs who returned to Apple was a much more capable leader — precisely because he had been badly banged up. He had spent 12 tumultuous, painful years failing to find a way to make the new company [NeXT] profitable. 'I am convinced that he would not have been as successful after his return at Apple if he hadn’t gone through his wilderness experience at NeXT,' said Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies, a technology consulting company. ..."

Stupid (aka: Dangerous) "Justice" Department/NSA Ideas 2.0

NYTimes.com:

... [Federal] officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.

The bill, which the Obama administration plans to submit to lawmakers next year, raises fresh questions about how to balance security needs with protecting privacy and fostering innovation. And because security services around the world face the same problem, it could set an example that is copied globally.

James X. Dempsey, vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an Internet policy group, said the proposal had “huge implications” and challenged “fundamental elements of the Internet revolution” — including its decentralized design.

“They are really asking for the authority to redesign services that take advantage of the unique, and now pervasive, architecture of the Internet,” he said. “They basically want to turn back the clock and make Internet services function the way that the telephone system used to function.” ...

Net Neutrality Activists Target Google as Talks Heat Up

Digits - WSJ:

Net neutrality activists and left-leaning interest groups are launching an online advertising campaign targeting Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin for the company’s recently announced agreement about web traffic delivery with Verizon Communications.

Google has long been a supporter of net neutrality – the idea that Internet providers can’t deliberately block or slow data traffic – however the company’s recent legislative proposal with Verizon prompted some activists to suggest the search giant had sold out on the issue.

The Google-Verizon proposal would have given the FCC limited authority to police Internet lines. But it would have allowed Verizon and other Internet providers to create special prioritized lanes of Internet traffic for companies willing to pay extra. It also wouldn’t have imposed net neutrality rules on wireless Internet networks.

“We’re continuing to rally the public, including techies in Silicon Valley, against Google’s decision to be evil and harm the free and open Internet,” said Jason Rosenbaum, senior online campaigns director for the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a left-leaning political interest group, in a statement. ...

Book Review - The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

Check Joy Lo Dico's review of Nicholas Carr's intriguing new book. This comes from The Independent: "The headline-grabbing concept of The Shallows is that the internet is rewiring our brains to negative effect. Carr recognizes that he is placing himself in a proud tradition of Jeremiahs bemoaning technological advancements, from Socrates, who fretted that the written word would create 'forgetfulness', via the Gutenberg press naysayers, to those who were disturbed by the unfettering of the written word, the speed of the telegram, and finally the internet, a vast, seething jungle of distraction and inanity. ... "

Love this from Carr: "The bond between book reader and book writer has always been a tightly symbiotic one, a means of intellectual and artistic cross-fertilization. The words of the writer act as a catalyst in the mind of the reader, inspiring new insights, connections, and perceptions. And the very existence of the attentive, critical reader provides the spur for the writer’s work. It gives the author the confidence to explore new forms of expression, to blaze difficult and demanding paths of thought, to venture into uncharted and sometimes hazardous territory. 'All great men have written proudly, nor cared to explain,' said Emerson. 'They knew that the intelligent reader would come at last, and would thank them.'"

In Carr's view, prolonged exposure to the rapid and varied flood of information on the internet has caused a sort of societal ADD: a general inability in individuals to think long and deeply on any one subject.

I'm not so sure. I note that Carr, though he diagnoses himself with this malaise, has nevertheless been able to think long and deeply enough to come up with yet another carefully researched and reasoned tome.

In my view, the internet is just like any other tool. The benefit, or lack thereof, derives from how one uses it. If the internet is simply your connection for playing a lifetime's worth of Halo with strangers, or mindlessly "surfing" from one wave to another as so many do, then, yes, it'll rewire your brain to negative effect. If, on the other hand, it is your lifeline for collaboration on serious work with colleagues around the globe ...

Net Neutrality Agonistes

Time Magazine via Yahoo! News: "On a Thursday night in August, some 750 people crammed into a high school auditorium in Minneapolis to discuss the future of the Internet. Most of them went to beseech members of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to act to protect Internet neutrality, the premise that all data on the Web should be treated equally. During the three-hour forum, organized by the pro-Net-neutrality coalition Save the Internet, an array of speakers warned that without safeguards in place, corporate behemoths would cut lucrative deals to prioritize some kinds of content and throttle others, turning themselves into the unofficial gatekeepers of the world's best leveling force. Net neutrality, said Senator Al Franken, is 'the First Amendment issue of our time.' In the weeks since Google and Verizon published a controversial proposal on the issue, Net neutrality has become the newest front in an ideological war waged by the pricey lobbyists, paid spokesmen, partisan media outlets and Washington ward bosses who feast on fractiousness. Relying on a now familiar playbook, a tableau of conservative interest groups has used the specter of a so-called government takeover of the Internet to mobilize Tea Party organizations. Liberal counterparts warn that corporate bigwigs are trying to cement their control of the Web at your expense. ... "

Net Neutrality Talks: A Struggle for What We Already Have

Joe Nocera, NYTimes.com: "President Obama came out for net neutrality during his presidential campaign. Julius Genachowski, his former law review colleague and basketball buddy, who helped him arrive at that campaign position, is now the chairman of the Federal Communication Commission. Right-thinking public interest groups, like Public Knowledge ('Fighting for your digital rights in Washington') are fierce, unyielding proponents of net neutrality, viewing its goodness as obvious. Google professes to be a champion of net neutrality. So does Skype. Even the Internet service providers say they favor it. And yet, here we are, a year and a half into the Obama presidency, and net neutrality is no closer to being encoded in federal regulation than it was when George W. Bush was president. ..."

The Google/Verizon Attack on Net Neutrality

NYTimes.com:

SAN FRANCISCO — Google and Verizon on Monday introduced a proposal for how Internet service should be regulated — and were immediately criticized by groups that favor keeping the network as open as possible.

The proposal includes exceptions for wireless Internet access and for potential new services that broadband providers could offer, including things like “advanced educational services, or new entertainment and gaming options.”

The announcement is the latest move in a high-stakes battle over a principle known as net neutrality. The debate is over whether Internet users should be able to access all types of online information on an equal basis, or whether Internet service providers should be able to charge content companies for faster transmission.

The proposal says that nonwireless Internet providers should not be able to discriminate against or offer paid prioritization to any Internet content providers, and that the Federal Communications Commission should have the authority to stop or fine those who break these rules.

But the proposal excludes wireless access, a fast-growing portion of Internet traffic.

The proposal “sacrifices the future of the mobile wireless Internet as this platform becomes more central to the lives of all Americans,” said Gigi B. Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a consumer group, in a statement. ...

Net Neutrality - F.C.C. Opposes Fees for Internet Priority

F.C.C. Chief Opposes Fees for Internet Priority - NYTimes.com:

WASHINGTON — The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission said Thursday that he believed it was “unacceptable” for Internet service providers to offer faster Internet transmission to content providers willing to pay higher fees.

“Any outcome, any deal that doesn’t preserve the freedom and openness of the Internet for consumers and entrepreneurs will be unacceptable,” Julius Genachowski, the F.C.C. chairman, told reporters on Thursday.

His remarks came in response to press reports that Google and Verizon were nearing an agreement about broadband management that could clear the way for Verizon to consider offering such a service. ...

Many Internet purists believe that a system that includes a sort of toll lane for faster routing of some content to Internet users violates the long-held tenet of net neutrality, which holds that no form of content is favored over another. But a federal appeals court said in April that the F.C.C. did not have the authority to regulate how Internet service providers manage their systems. ...

The F.C.C. is studying the possibility of reclassifying broadband service under the Communications Act. The proposed new designation would allow the agency to apply stricter regulation to broadband service and to further its efforts to expand broadband access to rural areas, particularly where it is not profitable for Internet service providers to offer connections. ...

Google and Verizon Team Up to Kill Net Neutrality

This is very bad news.

Google and Verizon in Talks on Selling Internet Priority - NYTimes.com: "Such an agreement could overthrow a once-sacred tenet of Internet policy known as net neutrality, in which no form of content is favored over another. In its place, consumers could soon see a new, tiered system, which, like cable television, imposes higher costs for premium levels of service. Any agreement between Verizon and Google could also upend the efforts of the Federal Communications Commission to assert its authority over broadband service, which was severely restricted by a federal appeals court decision in April."

A bit of useful background from the EFF here.