Unanswered Steve Jobs questions
A lot has been said about Steve Jobs in the 24 hours since his death and some of that has come from me. It has been 24 hours of round-the-world media interviews, most of them live but you can see an edited version of me this Friday on ABC’s 20/20, which is doing a Jobs tribute of some sort. Remember ABC’s parent is Disney and Jobs was Disney’s largest shareholder. With all that has been said and written, however, I’m hard put to know what there is I can add here. I can tell you though the two Jobs questions I still want answers for, and where I hope to find those answers.
Question #1 — […]
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.