
McGraw-Hill CEO: "The tablet is going to be just really terrific" - Anon84
http://www.tuaw.com/2010/01/26/mcgraw-hill-ceo-the-tablet-is-going-to-be-just-really-terrific/
======
swombat
2 options:

1) Legally incompetent CEO of a major international corporation

2) Another controlled leak from Apple.

Which do you think is more likely?

~~~
seldo
In all seriousness, option (1). There's no upside to leaking this 24 hours in
advance of actually announcing it when hype is already at fever pitch.

And if you need examples of hilariously incompetent CEOs I refer you to the
automotive and banking industries.

~~~
joezydeco
_Sure_ there's an upside. Now that the market knows media companies are
involved, they all will spike tomorrow morning when the market opens.

You also prime the hype pump one more time. Remember that the financial types
don't read tuaw, gizmodo, and engadget all day long looking for Apple rumors.
I consider it the noisemaker they shoot off before the real firework show
starts.

~~~
byrneseyeview
As opposed to spiking a day later?

------
jasonlbaptiste
McGraw Hill CEO found dead. Silver Mercedes with no license plate seen fleeing
the crime.

~~~
novum
About 18 months ago I was driving on the 101 near Mountain View, headed north
at 10pm or so, when a white Mercedes with no plate zoomed past me. I was doing
70, it must have been going over 100.

Always wondered if that was Steve.

~~~
defen
I'm confused...is it a well known thing that Jobs' car has no plates? Is that
legal?

~~~
novum
It's a common rumor that Jobs doesn't have plates on his car. This article
speculates that it's not legal, but Jobs (or his staff) just pays the $250
fine if he's ever ticketed for it. Some of the comments also speculate that
Jobs' car has suffered repeated vandalism due to people stealing his plates,
and that the DMV has made an exception for him.

<http://www.iphonesavior.com/2008/09/steve-jobs-barc.html>

~~~
rms
In Pennsylvania, you can look up summary offense level driving/parking tickets
for everyone via a convenient online form. I tried looking Jobs up, but
California seems to wisely keep such information off of the internet.

Edit: There are 5 random cases with Steve Jobs in San Mateo that are the
matter of public record, but California seems to keep all traffic information
off of the internet. Compare to PA where a parking ticket doesn't go on the
internet, but driving without a license plate does.

------
ryanwaggoner
Jobs has got to be pissed.

~~~
pmjordan
Yeah, that's presumably the last time McGraw-Hill get to do any pre-release
deals with Apple. It's not clear to me how that stunt is a net gain to them.

~~~
johnrob
If e-readers are really going mainstream, McGraw-Hill will have a whole lot
more to worry about than a sour relationship with Apple.

~~~
jws
On the contrary. The text book industry views 2nd hand text books as theft.

Currently they do everything in their power to devalue 2nd hand sales, such as
pointlessly churning the edition every year or two or even integrating course
notes and syllabus for a specific professor. Once they go to e-readers there
will be no 2nd hand sales and they can stop wasting resources on pointless
editing and profit skyrockets!

Until MIT OpenCourseWare puts them all out of business. Good riddance.

~~~
llimllib
How does OCW do anything but increase textbook demand?

------
novum
He did say "based on iPhone OS", but I wonder if he mis-spoke especially given
that he's not necessarily tech-savvy.

In all likelihood, the tablet OS will be based on OS X in the same way that
iPhone OS is - many of the same architectural underpinnings, but a completely
different presentation layer that's optimized for the hardware.

Maybe he meant "based on OS X, like iPhone OS"?

~~~
tfincannon
Over the weekend, Flurry detected iPhone apps with their analytics embedded
running on a device with a tablet-sized screen. That makes it very likely the
tablet is running iPhone OS.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1074409>

------
kordless
He used the term 'tabloid' a couple of times. I've been doing a bit of
trademark searches the past few days, so I just popped over and did one on the
'tabloid' trademark:
[http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=7...](http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=71039426)

Look down at the prosecution history entries. There's a new entry for
appointing a new attorney, just filed about a week and a half ago. Could be a
coincidence, but then again...

~~~
greendestiny
It's registered to GlaxoSmithKline and limited to class 051 "Cosmetics and
toilet preparations", specifically described as PILLS. So probably a
coincidence.

~~~
kordless
Just thinking about the whole Droid thing a few months ago. That was a
completely separate class as well...

------
Shamiq
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1079224>

Seth joins the club.

~~~
whalesalad
Wow so a vook is like a book with the distraction of video and a movie with
the distraction of text.

~~~
omouse
Sounds like a piss-poor idea.

------
aichcon
"Based on the iPhone OS" doesn't mean it IS the iPhone OS.

~~~
siculars
I doubt that guy even knows what "based on the iphone os" even means.

------
gstar
I'm sure he said 'the tabloid is going to be really terrific' at the end -
misspoken, or is that the name of the tablet?

~~~
mogston
I was thinking it would be called MacXXXX or something starting with Mac. But
MacTablet, sounds too much like a McDonald's product.

------
patrickgzill
My suspicion is that the tablet will incorporate some sort of display that is
different from a "regular" display.

If forced to guess, I would choose something from PixelQi,com or one of the
competing technologies.

------
jordyhoyt
I think I will probably avoid Hacker News tomorrow. At least one story every
day has been ridiculous, I can't imagine what it will be like after the
announcement.

------
jonknee
This just in: Guy with fancy title repeats everything we've speculated for
months.

~~~
dschobel
It's interesting because a) it's the first confirmation we have from a first-
party source and b) the way the guy did it most likely just screwed his
company out of any future Apple dealings.

------
thras
iPhone-based OS. I wonder if everything will have to go through an App-store?
Annoying if so.

~~~
tvon
I don't think there was ever a reasonable chance of anything else. I mean, if
you're Apple, why _do_ anything else? For the most part consumers clearly love
to use the App Store. It has serious review process and barrier to entry
issues, but those can be fixed over time (hopefully) and as long as there is
an active audience, vendors will continue to come.

~~~
thras
The problem is that there is a hell of a lot of general purpose software out
there already that's never going to be worth the effort to port to a single
device.

The iPhone has some nice apps, but runs nothing important to me in my
professional life. And if the new tablet isn't going to be a useful work tool,
why would I want it?

~~~
CamperBob
What's your profession, and what tablet/phone apps might be helpful but not
yet available?

~~~
megaduck
I can't speak for thras, but if I can't do software development on a device,
that's a pretty big problem.

I'd love to replace my netbook with sleek little tablet, but the odds of Apple
selling something that runs Java, Ruby, or emacs is slim-to-none.

------
dnsworks
You are all very, very good little consumers.

And Apple doesn't even have to pay you for generating it's hype.

~~~
zackattack
Dude, get over it. Let me guess: you grow all your own food and you abstain
from all media (oh, hey, wait a second..)? Apple devices are useful problem-
solving technology, and they bring a lot of joy to people's lives.

~~~
papachito
> Apple devices are useful problem-solving technology

Probably.

> and they bring a lot of joy to people's lives

but that sounds a little to fanboy, "joy" to your life? really?

~~~
zackattack
Yes dude. I get tons of joy from my Macbook. I love it. It connects me to the
Internet. It plays music. It's wonderful.

~~~
dnsworks
It connects you to the internet. It plays music.

My 3 year old daughter has a $100 piece of plastic that does both of those
functions.

