And now the frenzy begins. Running this story in reverse it’s suddenly clear why Apple didn’t introduce the iPhone 5 this week. It would have been lost in the news of Jobs’s death, killing the marketing value he would have loved. I’m sure the phone will appear in a week or two with that appearance in part to encourage the recovery of Apple shares from what is sure to be a short-term decline.
I first met Steve Jobs in the spring of 1977 when I helped the two Steves take a prototype computer out of Woz’s Fiat at a Homebrew Computer Club meeting. In the 34 years that followed I was hired and fired by Steve more than once, our relationship conducted in large part […]
When I was in school we had the occasional class discussion in history or social studies about the role of the frontier in U.S. economic development. Back then (this was the 1960s) if the teacher was sharp this would sometimes segue into a discussion about the implications for America of being without an obvious frontier — a condition that was widely known even then. Those conversations have stilled for some reason with the rise of what seems to me to be societal stupidity, but it is my growing sense that this is at the heart of our current economic malaise. We need a new frontier.
I love the 
This week I’m at NASA’s Green Flight Challenge in our new home town of Santa Rosa, California. It’s a contest for efficient flight using alternative energy that I’ll be writing more about later in the week. Much of the $1.65 million in prize money comes from Google, the subject of this column. I’ve been giving a lot of thought to Google’s strategic path under once-and-future CEO Larry Page and think I’ve got a couple things figured out. Google is right now in the process of changing, well, its process. Page is rebuilding the company but not doing a very good job of explaining himself, so I’ll just have to handle that here.
I’ve 