[Taylor, I pinkie-swear I won't write about Apple or Steve Jobs after this post for at least one month.]
I won’t go into detail about what happened at Macworld yesterday. I leave that to the multitude of other bloggers who are on the ground in San Francisco. But something was definitely in the air, and it was a pretty great event. If you want to catch Jobs’ keynote, see here.
In an interview with the New York Times following his presentation yesterday, Steve Jobs put in his word about several initiatives being undertaken by his competitors. He had this to say about the Amazon Kindle, the web commerce giant’s e-book reader that marks its first foray into physical products:
“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”
Continue reading ‘Steve Jobs on Reading’
What follows is not as off-topic as you might think. In preparation for Macworld Expo 2008, I have sought here to reconstruct the events that last year led me to “make the switch” from PC to Mac. I ended up not making a “switch,” in fact – I made a “leap.” I’m a shameless Apple fanboy now. This anecdote not only chronicles personal changes I’ve made, but also documents how a company like Apple can so inspire change that it creates a cult, a movement, even an identity. That’s some powerful stuff, and something worth bloggin’ about.
About a year ago, I was sitting in my house in Alabama, enjoying the last few days of what had been almost a month off from school for the Christmas / New Year / Martin Luther King holidays. Man, I wish I was back in school so I could have long breaks like that again. Anyway. It was 11:00 am in Alabama, which just so happened to be 9:00am in San Francisco. I was reading the “live blog” of Macworld Expo 2007, the annual convention where Apple and its developers show off new products. The highlight of the event, the Christmas Day of the Apple calendar, is what has become known as the Stevenote — the keynote presentation by Apple CEO Steve Jobs where, without fail, he unveils new products or features that change the playing field. I was in my pajamas, eating waffles and sipping coffee, with my Dell laptop in front of me. I was captivated, transfixed in a state of what Fake Steve Jobs correctly terms “childlike wonder”.
Continue reading ‘“There’s Something In The Air”: How Apple Brings You Into The Flock, And Keeps You There’
En route to my mailbox from Amazon.com (via my mother as a sort-of late Christmas present… thanks Mom!) is The Big Switch by Nick Carr. A former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, Carr is now widely regarded as an authoritative voice on information technology. He frequently comments on the impact of IT on culture and business, and this new book explores the history, the present, and the future of that impact. I look forward to reading it and reporting back in.
This morning, Carr published an excerpt from the first chapter of The Big Switch on his blog. While you should definitely check out the whole excerpt, here is — as Fake Steve would put it — the “money quote”:
In the years ahead, more and more of the information-processing tasks that we rely on, at home and at work, will be handled by big data centers located out on the Internet. The nature and economics of computing will change as dramatically as the nature and economics of mechanical power changed with the rise of electric utilities in the early years of the last century. The consequences for society – for the way we live, work, learn, communicate, entertain ourselves, and even think – promise to be equally profound. If the electric dynamo was the machine that fashioned twentieth century society – that made us who we are – the information dynamo is the machine that will fashion the new society of the twenty-first century.
For another interesting post by Carr (especially for you dual Apple- and Googlephiles), read this.
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