

One More Thing… - emwa
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/26/one-more-thing/

======
Tichy
For me it is definitely not touching because I am emotionally involved with
Apple products. I tend to rant against them all the time, and I just bought a
Galaxy Tab. I most like Jobs for his inspiring Stanford Speech. Yet hearing
the news made me feel awful.

There are all sorts of aspects of the story, though. For one thing, it is a
genius who is clearly extremely passionate about his work, and who has a lot
of money, but he still has to yield to the disease. That is tragic.

Also, while I don't like Apple, I still like Jobs philosophy, and the pressure
they put on other companies to improve their products.

I only wish Apple wouldn't be so silly with patents, they really taint my
admiration for Jobs.

Think about it - patents are land claims in the sphere of ideas. We cheer
about the innovations, but essentially it is like native Americans cheering on
the colonists when they took away their land. I am surprised that for all his
desire for aesthetics, Jobs was not bothered by the ugliness of patents. Just
mentioning it, because I could admire him more without that elephant in the
room.

~~~
bh42222
_For one thing, it is a genius who is clearly extremely passionate about his
work, and who has a lot of money, but he still has to yield to the disease.
That is tragic._

I wonder is a Steve Jobs of biotechnology even possible?

Craig Venter is great, but I just don't see any of his companies growing
bigger then Exxon. But if anything should be bigger the Exxon, it is exactly
those kind of companies!

~~~
bl
Sorry to be pessimistic, but my sense is, "No, there will not be a Steve Jobs
of biotechnology."

Mr. Jobs has done a remarkable job producing sleek, fun-to-use, affordable,
somewhat disposable devices and building Apple into a company that has a
chance of sustaining his principles. Even taking into account the fickleness
of the mass consumer market, herding sub-component suppliers, etc., there is a
certain predictability to the advances in electronics technology (Moore's
"Law", increases in battery performance, etc.) that gives a solid foundation
for a regularly growing business. Fashioning aluminum, cadmium, silicon, and
lithium is _way_ more predictable than discovering a pharmaceutically-
treatable, financially-lucrative metabolic disease.

There are certainly smart, extremely hard-working individuals in the
biotechnology fields --- perhaps surpassing Mr. Jobs in those qualities, and
some we'd certainly label as "geniuses" --- but the fantastically low
probability of making even one genuine discovery, and the low odds of
successfully developing that into a product, make the kind of serial successes
of Apple and Mr. Jobs very unlikely in the biotech field. Biology results just
don't flow that easily. Also, there is no clearcut equivalent in biological
research to outbidding your competitors for the latest components,
streamlining your manufacturing and inventory processes, and relying on
economies of scale.

I can say this now only with the benefit of hindsight: my negative answer to
bh42222's question stems from the fact that we just haven't observed such
figure emerge in the last few decades. Craig Venter is a good example to look
at. He certainly earned a great victory in the human genome sequencing (and
the underlying technologies), but he lacks even a second notable success of
that magnitude. It will probably be the purview of someone else to find the
utility in the sequenced genome. Dean Kamen may be a prototype figure of this
sort, but as nice as his individual inventions are, no single one of them
seems rise to the level of a Steve-Jobs-in-the-biotech-field. I may be
stunningly wrong on this (and it would be great fun if I was), but I think the
probabilities are on my side, and on the side of it not happening.

But let's put aside the negativity and allow me to ask this question: Do we
need a Steve Jobs of biotechnology to fulfill our expectations of medical
advancement? I would guess, "No, we don't. The good people toiling away at it
right now are doing the best that can be done."

~~~
mdonahoe
Venter's artificial cell seemed notable.

------
zitterbewegung
This is the techcrunch I like. A warm and moving piece about a man who
revolutionized the consumer electronics space. Not a piece with sensationalist
issues. A piece of substance.

I have an emotional connection with Steve jobs. I admit that my first computer
that I had an emotional attachment was an Apple II. I admit that the Macintosh
computer brought me where I was today. Without a mac I wouldn't have created
my android app, learned the scheme programming language, gone to HN, to
Reddit, to slashdot. If there is any person I owe a consumer debt to it is
this man. I can't even write this without crying.

------
Jun8
"We know the iOS 5 is coming, and very likely alongside the iPhone 5. There
will also likely be a cheaper “iPhone 4S”, perhaps sold contract-free. Apple
will also undoubtedly refresh the iPod lineup as they always do around this
time. And there is talk of the company having some tricks up their sleeves
when it comes to new content for iTunes."

Notice a conspicuous absence from this list? A revamped, much better Apple TV.
As he says, Jobs' two biggest successes was to break the monopolies in music
and cell phones (the latter thought to be impossible to do just few years
ago). One thing he (or Google or anyone else for that matter) couldn't do is
to break the cable TV stronghold form the leech-like grip of the likes of
Comcast.

So, maybe the mindblowing thing this fall will be something like that. Would
be super. I doubt it.

~~~
eftpotrm
The market dynamics with TV are rather different though.

The music _industry_ as a whole Apple haven't broken; record labels still
exist and the bulk of commercial music is distributed through them. What
they've broken was the physical distribution model in favour of a digital
model controlled by them, by providing a large semi-captive audience.

Equally with phones, they haven't destroyed the model of networks selling a
pre-agreed bundle of services at a flat tariff with the pre-pay component
being vastly cheaper than the post-pay. What they've broken is the assumption
that carriers could do what they liked with phones, but again I think this was
less of a challenge than you think; pre-smartphones we all had much what came
out of the factory because that was all that was possible, and phones have
long been a fashion driven market. Apple simply managed to get a bigger
fashion leap (not that this was the only leap) on their competitors to the
point where carriers couldn't avoid taking the phone on Apple's terms once one
had given in.

With TV, I suspect the bulk of HN readers can quite plainly see by now that
what we used to call 'video on demand' is both economically deliverable over
the internet and a compelling user experience compared with having to organise
one's life around a broadcast schedule to receive the preferred content.

The challenge for Apple is how to insert themselves as the default gatekeeper
in the way they have with iTunes and iOS. Compared with music the content
providers are fewer in number and with a substantially higher cost base,
making them both harder to supplant and more risk averse. Compared with mobile
carriers, the power dynamics are reversed; the hit product becomes the
network's unique content not the hardware vendor's fashionable item. If Apple
had managed to produce a hypothetical viable Apple TV product (and delivery
channel) prior to services such as Hulu, BBC iPlayer or even YouTube and
Justin.TV then there could have been a window of opportunity for them as
gatekeeper, but I think that would have been an improbable scenario and is
clearly not possible now.

Which leaves Apple with a problem in the Apple TV. The compelling offering is
the content not the device; the content providers have a strong incentive to
make their wares widely, not narrowly available. iOS has prospered as a
closed, Apple-controlled ecosystem, yet the opportunity isn't there with TV.
Their only opportunity is to provide a hardware device which is sufficiently
far ahead of the alternatives as the first iPod was perceived as being when
that launched, but I'd suggest that the market there is already sufficiently
mature as to make that unlikely.

------
benologist
"Yesterday, TechCrunch saw record traffic thanks to a few stories on Jobs."
... so here's another one.

------
zinssmeister
This was the only article I read about Steve leaving Apple. It says it all and
had me on the edge of my seat...a bit. One of the best articles on Techcrunch
in a while.

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hobolobo
The fawning tone of the piece is a bit off-putting. It is significant to
consumer tech that he's stepping down as CEO but not to the vast majority of
the world.

------
hessenwolf
Moving towards a world where having contact with at least one Apple product
per day is the norm? Pfft. Nice article other than that weirdly my-social-
circle-centric line.

