Forget Barack Obama. Forget Sarah Palin. Forget even Lindsay Lohan. They may just be blips on the screen of history when compared to Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. These are the figures that are truly influencing our times.
The latest from Jobs’ Apple today, according to the WSJ, is that the iPhone is ready to move beyond its AT&T-only platform and on to Verizon. The usually reliable AppleInsider goes further, suggesting the iPhone will be on T-Mobile and/or Sprint as well and will come in a variety of forms and sizes, the better to compete with Google’s Android.
In case you missed it, Apple is already the second biggest corporation in the world in terms of capitalization and is poised to pass Exxon as number one, possibly this winter with the iPad this year’s most coveted Xmas gift. The Silicon Valley company is sitting on some 50 billion in cash, pretty well positioned to do whatever it takes to maintain their technological/aesthetic edge. That’s one helluva long way from two young guys in a garage, tinkering with a computer. It’s close to the most extraordinary business story of all time.
This only proves that things can still be done well in California — just not by politicians. I wonder if this is for long. Consciously or unconsciously, the politicians seem to be doing everything in their power to get us all to leave. The current election has the most atrocious list of candidates for key positions in recent memory. Could you put together a worse collection than Jerry Brown, Barbara Boxer, Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina? Well, maybe. But not by much. And this in our most populous state with the eighth biggest economy in the world. For shame. I will, of course, be voting and rooting for Whitman and Fiorina, but with no special pleasure or expectation. It’s just self-defense.
I saw the movie this past weekend and did a little research on the “facts” as opposed to what was told in the story when I got home. The truth I found to be even more interesting, as is usually the case.
The California state economy is in dire straits. This state has real estate in its lifeblood and it needs a transfusion. The “barely” employed in the real estate sector are hidden from the “unemployment” statistics. The domino effect of residential and commercial real estate going dormant, reverberates throughout every nook and cranny of this failing, dying system.
Hollywood, Venture Capital and tech companies were major hotbeds of activity and now are mostly sideline sitters, with the occasional flash or spark, but no sustained activity.
Agriculture is being starved for water, while we advance the cause of insects and leeches. (from the human and animal kingdoms)
We are blocked and walled off from using our vast natural resources, because tapping into them would send the Green Supremacists in flights of homicidal fury and fantasies.
We are bankrupt, overrun by “undocumented citizens” (whatever that oxymoron means), have stuffed 20 pounds of entitlements into a three pound bag, that now has sprouted holes everywhere on its threadbare surface. We have a legislature that is the living embodiment of Audrey II, getting fatter and fatter and still looking for that next drop of blood to squeeze. “Feed me….FEED ME!”.
We keep waiting for the “big one” to hit. But the economic tectonic plates shifted long ago. It’s the aftershocks that are killing us.
California is broken…and it is dead broke. The choice between Barbara Boxer and Jerry Brown or Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina is the choice between those who have been slopping at the public trough for the last 30-40 years and those who have proven they can run large, successful corporations, businesses and manage a budget.
Barbara Boxer and Jerry Brown got us here. I would think we would want someone to get us out of where they brought us….not dig us deeper into it.
But hey, what do I know?
P.S. (Roger, I wrote you an email earlier about an article, did you get it?)
Agree on the movie, as you will see on the forthcoming Poliwood. The truth is more interesting. (Movie well made though).
Regarding getting rid of Boxer and Brown, I of course totally agree. Unfortunately, Whitman and Fioriana have run inept campaigns against sitting ducks in a Republican year. Disappointing.
Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina must win by a minimum of five points on Election Day. They must have some sort of mandate to even begin to help save California from utter ruin. This is probably the state’s last chance. Everyday California loses an average of 500 citizens—and the majority of them are purple and red state voters. I get the impression that most Californians prefer to live in fantasy land.
Roger, while California is in many ways a cesspool of (il)liberal politics, its saving grace, Silicon Valley, would be a shadow of itself without the real powerhouse in its midst-Caltech. Without the innovation of Caltech grads-and even some of their profs-Silicon Valley would be vastly overrated.
Whereas some of its talent hails from the confines of Cambridge, MA, they are a mere fraction of the true talent.Again, without Caltech, Silicon Valley would be a lightweight, and California would be a much less viable place to be-capital investment-wise.
Meg and Carly deserve full credit and support. The only way to stop the Statist juggernaut of the Obamanauts is with a big tent vote this November: a clear message to cease and desist. Purists will find fault (I never did see a perfect candidate), but the support these two candidates deserve is something a lot more full throated than tepid and doubtful. Their personal commitment cannot be in doubt – one just back from fighting off cancer, the other putting her own wealth into the game.
After they are elected, we can put pressure on these and other leaders to go further in the direction we want (or else) – but first we need to get them in. Without their victory, we are on such thin ice in California that it is truly sobering to think about the consequences of a victory by Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer.
Herb Stein’s famous law “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop” applies here. We know what the something is that can’t go on; the only question is HOW it is going to stop. Will it be a controlled stop or a crash into the brick wall at 60 mph? Right now, it’s looking like the latter – think of Greece only the rioters are eating bean sprouts.
“Eating bean sprouts” & wearing hemp sandals made by the free people of California whilst sipping water anointed by delta smelt… with a little red book in their hip pocket.
I’ll be wearing proper outdoor wear and eating MRE’s to keep up my energy for humping a ten-pound Garand + ammo!
No surprise, Apple had to get away from ATT to survive or Android was going to eat its lunch. I think Android is on a roll but at least Apple is going to put up a fight.
The reason I resist the idea of using Steve Jobs and Apple as a road-map for California – and America – is simply this: Forget what it looks like now, what would the computer/electronics marketplace look like if Steve Jobs and Apple had their way, without competition?
Microsoft…
Steve runs Apple his way. He knows his competition and stays ahead by out innovating them. Just look at Andriod. It is a nice phone OS, but can scale onto tablet or dumb netbook. Google needs Chrome for that. Microsoft, on the other hand can’t build anything anymore (Win 7 is MacOS 7 (1990)). Steve and his people know this and have chosen the right parts to make things work. They also don’t have a device for every little thing someone else makes. Their product line is thin. Look at our government and you’ll find we have over 2100 federal agencies trying to produce a tablet OS for Microsoft and Google. BTW: iOS and MacOS X is the same.
Android runs just fine in a tablet format – Google thinks they are going to produce an OS geared towards smaller specific purpose computers (tablets and netbooks) and are currently calling it chrome. Even the junky Chinese tablet work fine as far as the OS and interface is concerned – their problems are shoddy hardware (resistive touch screens for instance).
Also iOS and Mac OS X are not *remotely* the same thing. Mac OS X is a Unix based system (parts from NeXTSTEP’s Mach kernel and Free/NetBSD kernel and supporting libraries). They build a propriety window manager over that and that is what most users will see, though you can get at the underlying Unix system which then feels quite similar to NeXT’s offerings.
iOS is an Apple developed system and has a *completely* different approach to what layers are out there. It is different from it’s kernel implementation all the up to its application services. The interface levels, service layers, system layers, security layers, etc *all* work totally different from OS-X. The execution models and process life cycles are no where near the same. They are about as similar as a Indy race car is similar to a Chevy Volt – they both have a steering wheel, gas pedal, brake pedal, and four wheels. Past that not much else is. They don’t even look the same superficially, let alone once you start getting into details. Even a standard user ought to note right off they are different let alone anyone that has any knowledge of how software works.
I can’t even begin to guess what you mean by “Windows 7 is Mac OS 7″ as they share even less in common than iOS and Mac OS-X do (that is they are both version 7′s).
With a name like “strcpy”, I’m going with your explanation over “hiscross”
Who would put a full-blown UNIX implementation on a handheld device? Who would believe that this is what Apple did? Only someone who doesn’t know a damn thing about computer science (e.g: “hiscross”).
The trouble with Californians moving out of their state is that they are moving into ours. Build a fence…..
A lot of us Californians that moved out put the place in our rearview mirrors; we didn’t bring it with us. I am a native Californian now living in Alabama. I miss two things: Trader Joe’s, and being able to grow my own citrus.
Roger,
I remember thinking about Michigan and the auto industry much as you are now thinking about California and the high tech industry a while back, and even trading a few posts with you about it.
My position then was that, despite my bedrock conservative principles, that a normal bankruptcy, like one that might suit (no pun) a dry cleaner in Clipper Gap, California, might just be too disruptive for many regions of the country to withstand, perhaps hastening a truly precipitous collapse from which a wide swath of Americans would not be able to be recover for three or four decades. So, holding my nose, with reservations, fear and loathing, I accepted that some form of “bailout” and a “managed” bankruptcy would be the best of a lot of bad options. It has actually turned out about as well as I could have expected. So called “Government Motors” has made some small but real gains, not collapsed and is slowly, painfully, trying to free itself of the Federal leash. It will take many years to complete, but at least they got much of what they needed to have a fighting chance to reorganize as a profitiable entity, avoiding even worse job losses for both blue and white collar employees than they had famously already suffered. The people of Michigan are on life support, but we are not yet dead.
The point of all this is not to bring up this whole episode so to spark the usual hearty contempt for all things GM that my conservative brothers and sisters usually post, but to mention that what you are looking at in California is much like what I saw in Michigan six or eight years ago, better in some ways, worse in others. California will surely suffer what Michigan did, and maybe worse, if there is not profound political change coming soon. Apple, as good as it appears today, is really only one step away from oblivion if we do not get our house in order. While it is true that the Apple team, top to bottom, is excellent at what it does, what it does can be, and certainly will be, done by many other companies around the world. Adding product value by developing new form factors in computer hardware and telephony are not beyond the capabilities of many companies in China, India and several other developing nations. And, Apple is almost completely dependent on the addictive low costs of manufacturing in the People’s Republic of China. Take that away, and would a $2,500.00 Ipad sell very well? I doubt it. I can’t help but think that the Chinese, the Indians and very many others are as individually creative as are their counterparts in America. All that has really separated us, and Apple, in the past has been out social and political history of individual liberty, less authoritarian control over everything, a nearly free market, no fear of capturing and using our natural resources and the protections provided by the U.S. Constitution. There is nothing special in the water here. If we lose those things, then there goes Apple and all the others like them. And, then, there goes California.
I look forward to the November election results from the left coast with great interest. I hope, for all our sakes, that, in five years time, we won’t be talking about a Silicon Valley bailout and MacGovernment.
Hope is not very useful. Keep plugging away for some real change this time around.
Roger, the Apple story goes back even further to the days when the Woz was making “blue boxes” to fool the old fashioned pay phones into thinking you had deposited money. The operator could tell the money deposited by the chime the coin made. Buy a set of chimes and the world is free.
Lindsay Lohan will never die!..but if she’d just go away for awhile that would be nice.
How can one reconcile relentless innovation and competitiveness with doctrinaire liberal Democratic politics? Steve Jobs does. What’s his secret?
California was the greatest state in the union when I was born there in 1953, as it was in 1927 when my parents were born in LA. Unfortunately we were overtaken in the 60′s,70′s and 80′s by foreign invaders, no, not Mexicans but east coast trust funders. It is an insidious cancer, I tell you.
So where were Boxer,Pelosi and Feinstein born? It wasn’t California.
How about Ahnold Shriver/Kennedy.
Dafrank – in light of Roger’s post and your comments, it might be interesting to learn that I’m cashing out in Hollywood and heading back to Michigan where I’m originally from. I think prospects there are actually muxh better than here in California currently.
I’ve been in California for 28 years and it has become a miserable cesspool of corruption, rapine political greed, insane taxation, and squandered potential. There has been a virtual relatively bloodless insurrection waged by millions upon millions of illegals who swarm our neighborhoods and have turned California, in wide, giant swaths, into something indistinguishable from Mexico.
BTW Roger – many friends of mine work the design and engineering fields, many of which are related directly to tech. Increasingly this group is finding work thinner and thinner from their former Silicon Valley stalwart clients. First the manufacturing went completely offshore, and now so are many of the top deign and marketing projects. California is rapidly becoming a hollowed out shell – I for one am happy to get out of Dodge while the getting is good. If you know anyone looking for a fabulous house in the Hills, I can hook you up!
I’d like to help you, Morton. But I live in the Hollywood Hills myself and, as you know, it’s littered with For Sale signs on fabulous homes. A lot of people are trapped here because they can’t sell their houses. I hope you’re not but… before you go decamp for Michigan… let me remind you of one thing… winter. They have them, we don’t. Nancy Pelosi can spout all the global warming nonsense she wants, but she can’t change our weather. Hey, I know, weather isn’t everything, but it is something. No telling how spoiled we’ve gotten.
We should start a PJM poker club in these har hills!
One thing you can’t accuse Jobs of doing is seeking hegemony. Restricting the iPhone to a single-carrier — at least until now– is not the sign of someone who wants complete control of everything.
As far as I can see what motivates Jobs is product quality and not market share.
If Steve Jobs ruled the world, the trains, and everything else,
would run on time, and with cruel efficiency; The cooperation
between Apple and the local Law in the persecution of the person
who ‘purloined’ the prototype iPhone had a whiff of Fascism.
C’mon, M. Report, you don’t really believe that, do you? I mean I’ve spent time in real fascist countries like the Soviet Union and China in the seventies – and this is NOTHING like it. Keep things in perspective. Apple may be a tough competitor, but that’s all they are. Sometimes I’m the same way (only not as successful at it). The other thing about Apple is they make consistently amazing products that people want. Something to be said for that, isn’t there?
Speaking as a transplanted New Yorker, and now a long-time Michigander who has spent a lot of time out West, especially in the desert in CA shooting cars, I’d have to say that, yes, winter does suck. But, the silver lining is real; spring is so so very sweet – the greening, the musty smell of defrosted earth, the buds everywhere, and the sun, the glorious sun, appearing so brightly after its annual vacation somewhere down south. It’s a wonderful time to be alive, and it makes you very aware of all that circle of life stuff too – but without Simba the Lion or any of the Disney characters. And, then there’s the fall too. You can imagine.
The climate in CA is still its greatest asset, but there’s something to be said for the seasons, snow at ChristmaChanuka time and all that. As good as CA’s weather is, it won’t do that much to keep people who don’t have a job very happy, just more comfortable in their poverty. So, here’s hoping that the next tectonic shift in LA isn’t the moving of the earth’s crust, but a miracle of political sanity rising up from some deep well of the public consciousness, some magma layer of fiscal responsibility, bringing down the government clowns who have nearly destroyed one of the best places to live in America.
Good luck. But, if things don’t work out, we’ve got a spare bedroom, and I wouldn’t make you shovel the snow very often.
I live in L.A., and in the winter I can see snow from by beach-towel!
My worst case scenario for the low point of the reform of the US
has the country reduced to semi-independent states, the worst of
which has a state government about like that of ‘The Kingfish’
Huey Long, or ‘Benny the Moose’ Mussolini; I would much rather
not see that worst case come to pass, and sure as #### do not
want to live in it.
I think that may be a bit of hyperbole, but there is some truth to that – albiet not where you find it.
Steve Jobs has always had the mindset of a control freak and has always believed in extremely centralized control over his product. The real evidence for this is in how he managed – or rather mismanaged – the Apple personal computer line in the 1980′s. This was a guy who wanted to license and control his personal computers to the extent that he wouldn’t even sell a programming manual to you unless you went into the store in person. He refused to mail the programming manuals, even to the extent of refusing to ship them to universities lest they fall ‘into the wrong hands’. As such, he was building a computer which no one was writing software for and no one was learning to write software for. And the competive product was being put together in people’s garages and basements and being tinkered with by longer haired pimple faced teenagers who loved computers. His product therefore didn’t stand a change any more than a command economy can match the robustness of a free market.
I think you’ve got that backwards. Apple was started in a garage and produced the world’s first useful personal computer. In the early days their competition was IBM, not Miscrosoft.
Since when is going to the police about your stolen property “fascism”?
The guy that had the phone knew without a doubt, as he wrote himself, that is was Apple proprietary property that he had no legal or moral right to keep in his possession. Either he stole the phone himself or was knowingly in receipt of stolen property. Moreover, the value of a prototype is usually accounted in the tens of thousands of dollars so he had publicly declared that he had committed a felony.
Why shouldn’t the police have investigated? If it was your phone, you’d be mad as heck if someone swiped it, wrote it about it on line and then the police just shrugged.
I don’t know where we got this idea that it is okay to steal things as long as you blog about it.
Jim Baen published a book by Newt Gingrich, which annoyed TPTB,
and resulted in his company getting two consecutive reviews by
the IRS; Not the ordinary kind, but what Baen referred to as
‘The Proctological KInd’.
This was all perfectly legal, and also a clear abuse of power;
So was the case of the iPhone.
It was just barely bad, but in future there will be the temptation
to go from bad to worse in terms of ‘Special Relationships’ between
Big business and government; The time to prevent that is now, before
the precedent is established.
Hats off to Jobs and Apple. “User friendly” is the philosophy they started with and user friendly devices they continue to produce.
Gates and Microsoft meanwhile, produce increasingly elaborate products larded with features and options that most consumers don’t need or want and only make their products less user friendly.
Texas has a MUCH greater potential than California ever had. There’s endless room for more people, endless natural resources, and a much more favorable legal and political climate. Texas will be the country’s engine for the next century.
The US could survive if California washed into the sea. This is because we’d still have Texas in which to pick up the pieces.
The US could NOT survive if Texas seceded.
Shut up about Texas, we got too many California expats as it is.
Texas sucks, there is nothing to see or do here, just keep on moving, I hear La. and Alabama are wonderful places to live and work….
“If I owned Hell and Texas, Iwould live in Hell, and rent out Texas.”
I like Apple products quite a bit (iPhone, iPod, iMac, macbook) and have for a good 25 years. Yet, Apple could be displaced much quicker than many think. It is remarkable that Apple seems more powerful than Microsoft in many ways, but Google is a monster. Other companies will rise. Jobs is creative and insists on tasteful products, which gives a good user experience. But nothing lasts forever.
Apple remains headquartered in California and does almost all its design and software development there, but it’s clear they’re hedging their bets. Almost everything is, of course, assembled in China; its call centers are scattered; and its new billion dollar data center is in … North Carolina. Personally, I don’t know why they’ve stayed as long as they have. I suspect they’re getting a sweet tax deal. (California needs them more than they need California.)
Stockholders can rejoice in having a piece of a company with some $40 billion in cash (and no debt!) and hope the government keeps their hands off.
The only reason high tech still does well in California is that there is so little regulation. Wait until Liberal regulators come in. Net Neutrality for example.
Is it more important that I can get a Macbook Pro for about $1500, or that I would pay $2500 and the unemployment rate would go down? Multiply that same general scenario into all our businesses and here we are. As long as I have MY job (or retirement) this is the better deal, right?
Why are you including Meg Whitman with various bad guys?
Could you put together a worse collection than Jerry Brown, Barbara Boxer, Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina?
Sure. Pick any four from: Ron Dellums, Pete Stark, Gray Davis, Don Perata, and the members of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors.
So where were Boxer,Pelosi and Feinstein born? It wasn’t California.
It was for Feinstein. She was born in San Francisco.
The list is actually longer–Henry Waxman, Maxine Waters, Zoe Lofgren, Tom Ammiano–we’re flush with bozos.
Please! Not “Zoe”, but “Zöe”. Remember: having an oumlaut on a word or name automatically lends cachet and “clahss”. All she lacks is a hyphenated surname.
No! She lacks class and smarts too.
What is particularly interesting to me is that 10 years ago, I would have told you that Apple would be out of business within 10 years. Heck, I might have told you the same thing 20 years ago.
While I’m not a big fan of Steve Jobs, the man is a genious for if nothing else his ability to reinvent and remarket his company. He has almost continually mismanaged his company, but he’s always managed to find ways to right the ship, sell a new product, and attract a new market. I don’t think I would ever by any of his overpriced overmarketed items, but he certainly understands his public.
“He has almost continually mismanaged his company” What are you talking about? Look what Jobs has done since being tossed out of Apple: NeXT was ahead of its time, but still provided the foundation for OS X. Pixar was a raging success. And with the arguable exception of the Cube, it’s been one success after another: iMac, PowerBooks, iPod, iTunes, the shift to Intel, defeating Microsoft on multimedia, iPhone, iPad – just to name a few. Debt free and $40 billion in the bank. Every company in the world would love to be so “mismanaged”.
I had already forgotten Lindsay Lohan until you mentioned her…
I’ll grant that California has contributed a lot. But the thwarting of the current Goveror’s original reform agenda and his subsequent transformation into the Public Affairs Officer for the very system he had been elected to clean out shows that the rest of us have to make our plans without counting on California.
Just as the rest of the world should look at the USG’s antics and conclude roughly the same.
It may have been a nice run, but we can’t count on California pulling any trains in the future (except in the wrong sort of sense, screwed by the various interst groups that have Cali-for-nea locked down), just as neither should anyone expect anything better from the USG.
Gentry Class…Political Class…Governing Class…whatever term one prefers for the Extended Civil Service of public-private partnership (government, university, “NGO”, broader media, &tc) that holds us all in a death grip and believes in the false religion of Progressive Universalism, they have to go before any real restoration can be expected.
The only person who thwarted the Governator’s agenda was the Governator. He let a few CNA and CTA advertisements scare him off. Some friggin’ Terminator. What a disappointment.
I love Apple products and am addicted to my iMac, but having said that, that is about all I like about California. Know it is beautiful, climate wonderful (have been there and its just a feast for the eyes), but the California voters have earned their plight. They have put into office, over and over again, people who will spend and spend, seemingly have no common sense, are ruled by the far Left, and then wonder “What happened?” Whitman and Fiorina may not have waged good campaigns, but if the California voter sends Brown and Boxer back for a repeat, the residents of California deserve what they get. What they better NOT get is bailed out by the rest of us!
I would posit that it is no longer the captains of the new industry that are the most influential parts of the industry… just the opposite they are dancing to a tune that has been set by a few others and their rise and declines will be based on how well they adapt and adopt to those who have described what this new system is like. The names do not come trippingly to the tongue: Gordon Moore, Robert Metcalfe, Bruce Feiler, Stephen J. Gould and science historian James Burke. Taken together they describe the dawn of a new era not just in technology but in all aspects of our life.
Each of these men bring a critical piece of the future puzzle to the table and taken together they change what the nature of our lives, our businesses and our politics are. It is facinating that there is not an ideological push based on what they have put out, no ‘better days ahead’ (even with Ray Kurzweil, the change thesis is not one of enduring systems but of enduring liberty). The change and nature of change based on what we can know and do expands our horizons, and Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace, the iPod, netbook, and so on are all a reflection of this change and tools for it, not the change in and of itself. Taken as a whole, the combined thesis is one of rapid change of our ability to adapt to our world that far outstrips anything seen by any previous form of technology… and yet we remain, fundamentally, creatures of Nature.
The late 20th century of politics looks quaint compared to today, and tomorrow we will see today as the transition period from those old ways of doing things to a new way of doing things that will be created by each and every single one of us no matter if we like it or not. Our creations will fail, but our self-evident rights and liberty will continue on allowing us to change. Steve Jobs is just an instance of this phenomena, as is Bill Gates or any other technological tycoon. Their ability to adapt will allow them to succeed, or cause them to fail… the change will continue.
This only proves that things can still be done well in California
Still, if you want a liver transplant the place to go is Tennessee.
With the marijuana initiative bringing out the libs, I fear for Meg and Carly. And for our State!
Yet another great column! I am sitting in my new house in Austin in the midst of the boxes the mover brought here from the Bay Area. I was there for the last 14 years and I am so happy to NOT be there anymore. The fact that Brown and Boxer are still in the lead or tied with Whitman and Fiorina proves to me that most of my former neighbors must be insane (based on the definition of doing the same thing over and over). The Face book founder is correct there is something in the air in California its the Wacky Tobaccy smoke that will soon be legal for all to smoke out in the open. Wait that explains everything. Well all I can say I am so happy to be in Gods country, with my wine, my guns and my new Texan neighbors.
So, you moved from “Baghdah by the Bay”, to “Baghdad on the Colorado”?
I suppose moving to a “real” part of Texas would have involved too much culture shock.
“Could you put together a worse collection than Jerry Brown, Barbara Boxer, Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina?”
Gray Davis and Gloria Allread?
The lumping of Zuckerberg in with Jobs is a bit premature. It isn’t clear how Facebook generates revenue yet – or that there is any social utility in the company. The value of the entire company is speculative. The questions raised in the movie about making money are still relevant. Once ads become prominent it will cease to be “cool.” No one would pay for a subscription, so where is Facebook’s value? Google is a better example. At least Google is clear about how it generates revenue.
hello. with many tangents available regarding information technology and its place in the new world, the emergence of a company to pass an oil baron as the largest in the world, is itself remarkable. the age of oil -is making the plummet at the summit, and will now finally level off, at a constant rate; and eventually decline to its rightful place; in commodities. they have passed the economic apex, once visited by the railroad barons; and information technologies will be taking their place in the market of financial staples. our society will travel less, and communicate more efficiently. many will become home bodies. the robots better be ready, because it is becoming increasingly difficult to get people out of their homes. even then, they do not want to be involved with their environment. having $40 billion is insane, and other major corporations share the same dilemma. to all of us poor people, electronic escapism is the best solution to a world of insanity. congratulations to Apple, Google, and all the rest. Apple has a very friendly atmosphere, and is very user friendly, but i am amazed at its market share. i suspect much had to do with market controls.
Happy, shiny computers for everyone?
Hopefully “Apple” will go the way of the “Snapple”.
BTW, where IS the ‘snapple lady’? Maybe “Apple” should hire her?
Sorry, I was wrong about Feinstien’s birthplace. Wexler was born in California also, so I guess I can’t blame it all on the Soviet Peoples Republic of New England.
And yes I have a macbook(w/snow leopard) sitting right next to this win 7 machine I’m on.
Apple is exists as it does only in the eyes of Americans…and mainly because we are idiots. We throw our money at whatever we think will make us look popular with our neighbors, not what serves our needs effectively. This is why Apple barely even registers as a computer maker in the Asian and European markets. Two things are making money for Apple, the I-phone and I-tunes. This company is a joke. Charging extra for a USB port on its tablet?!? That’s insane. My TV has a USB port…everything comes with a USB port. Or how in the world do you release a cell phone that doesn’t maximize it’s energy transfer across its antenna? That’s circuits 101. Yet its one of the top companies in the US…because we are idiots. We complain about immigrants…and then hire the cheapest labor possible. We worry about crime and drugs amongst our children yet we elected Obama. We got no one else to blame but ourselves (I am speaking collectively…I myself wrote in Sam Brownback).
Really? There’s no question that you can get a lot more memory for less money with PC’s but also endless hassles. The Apples just chug along. My MacBook Pro is a keeper, that’s for sure.
dafrank said: My position then was that, despite my bedrock conservative principles, that a normal bankruptcy, like one that might suit (no pun) a dry cleaner in Clipper Gap, California, might just be too disruptive for many regions of the country to withstand, perhaps hastening a truly precipitous collapse from which a wide swath of Americans would not be able to be recover for three or four decades. So, holding my nose, with reservations, fear and loathing, I accepted that some form of “bailout” and a “managed” bankruptcy would be the best of a lot of bad options. It has actually turned out about as well as I could have expected. So called “Government Motors” has made some small but real gains, not collapsed and is slowly, painfully, trying to free itself of the Federal leash. It will take many years to complete, but at least they got much of what they needed to have a fighting chance to reorganize as a profitiable entity, avoiding even worse job losses for both blue and white collar employees than they had famously already suffered. The people of Michigan are on life support, but we are not yet dead.”
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The South is booming, car manufacturing, aerospace (Boeing moving to Charleston SC).
Now these Southern car companies have to compete against Government Motors, and pay the taxes that support them and their lavish pay and benefits of the UAW to boot.
Im sorry, the North-East Corridor had a good run, after they defeated the South in 1865 and then proceded to rape the rest of the nation of its resources and under their financial control.
Screw, em, I say. Let them reap what they sewed in Michigan. Ill never buy a car made North of the Mason Dixon line, ever.
The Seattlites cant understand why Boeing is moving production of the 787 Dreamliner to Charleston. They may never understand…but they do wish to keep us uppity Southerners down, you know us uneducated untrained rednecks.
Hey Escape,
Are you still sore about the South losing the Civil War or something? Good grief.
I am fine with you having an ideological dislike for government intrusion into the market, bad unionism, and, hopefully, championing the rights of businesses to move wherever they want, all of which I share with you. But what’s this about the awful Northeast corridor and their mission to “rape the rest of the nation of its resources and (put it) under their financial control” in 1865. Last I looked, that stuff, even if it were accurate (I defer to others here, as my knowledge of economic resource history is not that good before about 1940), occurred about 150 years ago. Boy, you hold a grudge for a long, long time. My best guess is, no one who may, or may not, have done that stuff you feel so strongly about is alive – not maybe not even their children.
So, let’s put down those Stars ‘N Bars for a minute and contemplate what concerns us all here – not a regional game of oneupmanship – but a very real concern about our whole country becoming a poor, debt-ridden and tired wreck of a colonial outpost to an international socialist agglomerate of dunderheaded apparatchiks, eventually to be spearheaded by an ascendant China and Islamist Third World Fascists, all courtesey of our boy wonder President and his band of like-minded merry men.
The South will not be immune to a total collapse of our financial system, and I don’t know a single person, anywhere, who might “wish to keep …(you) uppity Southerners down.” As far as thinking about Southerners, I certainly don’t know anyone personally who, outside of some folksy humorists on TV, thinks of them as “uneducated untrained rednecks” either. One could get a feeling of some oversensitive projection going on here, if one was looking for it.
The crux of my reply is that we’re all in this together, so let’s not fall into some obsure re-fighting of the War Between the States which will only benefit those who wish to continue the insane policies our country has been following of late.
You can buy whatever car you like, made anywhere, by anyone, as that is your right and one that I would strongly defend. But come on Escape, drop that corny “The South will rise again” rhetoric; we’re all Americans here, arent we?
I don’t get why you must say you are holding your nose to vote for Meg and Carly. Both are putting up their own personal fortunes to hopefully reverse the tide of bullshit, corruption and waste, and sacrificing what could otherwise be a peaceful final quarter to their lives. They are sacrificing a great deal of privacy, and you feel you must render an ambivalent judgement at best. We need a tidal wave of change, and we won’t get it unless there’s enough enthusiasm to carry both Carly and Meg over the top.
What? Do you want Jobs to run for high office? I’m very content to observe him running the best company in the world. Why aren’t you?
please see linkhttp://pajamasmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2010/10/06/its-steve-jobs-world-we-just-live-in-it/#comment-235371
Roger, watched your show, Poliwood, with author “Why are Jews Liberal”. Very interesting. Got the book.
I can understand, considering the history, but I would also like to know why these people you mention are all liberal.
That befuddles me more.
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