No, Eric Schmidt didn’t step down from being CEO of Google to take Steve Jobs’s position at Apple. I’m fairly certain Schmidt was demoted. Or if he wasn’t, then he should have been.
From a strict business perspective I suppose it’s ridiculous to criticize Schmidt’s performance at Google, but that won’t stop me. The guy has done a fabulous job of optimizing search and web advertising but nearly everything else he and Google have done has been a failure. What else does Google make money from other than search and ads?
Nothing.
Yeah, but YouTube is almost profitable, right?
Hardly. While YouTube may be operating at near break-even that completely ignores the minimum $5 billion sunk and lost in […]
At the Vatican, white smoke coming from a chimney at the Sistine Chapel indicates that a new Pope has been selected by the College of Cardinals. Well despite yesterday’s news of Steve Jobs’s departure again from Apple for medical reasons there is as yet no sign of white smoke in Cupertino where Jobs remains firmly in charge.
Last week’s murder of six and wounding of 14 in a Safeway parking lot in Tucson has led to a lot of discussion in both the blogoshere and the traditional press. Did heated political rhetoric in the media fuel the confrontation? Why didn’t the clearly erratic behavior of the alleged gunman tip-off authorities? I can speak from some experience in the latter case and feel that — for better or worse — teachers and administrators simply don’t extrapolate beyond their own social groups when assessing possible damaging behavior. I know I didn’t.
Apple has a long history of milking early adopters. Even the crappy products (remember the Newton? the Mac Cube?) would sell a few hundred thousand units to the faithful before those faithful learned the sad truth. But just as they were learning that truth, along would come Steve Jobs (okay, not in the case of the Newton, but generally) gleefully proffering the real fantastic product people had been expecting months before. Then those same early adopters, reenergized, would buy all over again, whether it was an iMac, iPod, MacBook, iPhone, whatever. Why should we think this week’s Verizon iPhone announcement is any different?