Not necessarily android news, but considering the iPhone is being targeted by a bevy of android-enabled smart phones, I thought this was mildly related.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs was named CEO of the decade by Fortune Magazine and frankly it’s not even a close call why he was chosen.
In the past 10 years alone he has radically and lucratively reordered three markets — music, movies, and mobile telephones — and his impact on his original industry, computing, has only grown.
Think about that for a second. Radically reordered three markets. There’s not an executive on the planet who doesn’t pray to the god of Midas for the skill and good fortune to influence a single industry. Steve Jobs turned three of them up-side-down and remade them without realizing the impact they would have on people.
Before iTunes came along, record label execs were scratching their heads trying to figure out how to stem the tide of falling profits and an onslaught of illegal file sharing on P2P networks. While there were several early businesses moving to monetize music downloads and the music industry is still loosing money, it was the iTunes experience and some of the most uniquely stylish music players — iPods — that managed to capture the imagination of consumers through ease of use and beautifully designed hardware as much a personal accessory as jewelry.
Pixar, before it became the enormously successful company that it is (9 out of 10 movies have been box office blowouts) was struggling as a computer graphics hardware company. It was Jobs who changed the company focus, struck distribution deals with Disney, and eventually negotiated the sale of the company to Disney for no less than 7 and a half billion dollars. Can you think of a single Pixar movie that you didn’t like or didn’t try to take your kids to see?
Then there’s the mobile phone industry and the iPhone — written about ad nauseam for the last 2 years — and unless you’ve been in a convent since early 2007, you already know what I’m talking about. According to the iPhone entry on widipedia.com, “Jobs rejected the ‘design by committee’ approach that yielded the Motorola ROKR” and convinced Cingular/AT&T that Apple would need complete control and authority over hardware and OS design decisions.
There is little doubt and even less dispute that the designation by Fortune is well-deserved and well-chosen.
The Fortune article is a good read.
Wikipedia entries: Steve Jobs, Pixar, iPhone, iTunes, Apple Computer
Loading ...