Technology – Page 29 – artdiamondblog.com

Driving to MobileIron Job Interview in $100,000 Car, Tells CEO Tinker You Are Not Hungry Enough

“Above, Robert Tinker, the chief executive of MobileIron, at its offices in Mountain View, Calif.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B2) “There are disruptions everywhere,” said Robert Tinker, the chief executive of MobileIron, which makes software for companies to manage smartphones and tablets. “Mobile disrupts personal computers, a market worth billions. Cloud disrupts computer servers and data storage, billions of dollars more. Social may be one of those rare things that is totally new.”

Relative to the size of the markets that mobile devices, cloud computing and social media are toppling, he says, the valuations are reasonable.
But most of these chief executives are also veterans of the Internet bubble of the late ’90s, and confess to worries that maybe things are not so different this time. Mr. Tinker, 43, drives a 1995 Ford Explorer that has logged 265,000 miles.
“If somebody comes to a job interview here in a $100,000 car, I know he’s not hungry,” he said. “The reality is, I’ve taken $94 million in investors’ money, and we haven’t gone public yet. I feel that responsibility every day.”

For the full story, see:
QUENTIN HARDY. “A Billion-Dollar Club, and Not So Exclusive.” The New York Times (Weds., February 5, 2013): B1 & B2.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date February 4, 2013.)

Many New Tech Entrepreneurs Shun “Fast Cars and Fancy Parties”

“Phil Libin, chief of Evernote, at its headquarters in Redwood City, Calif.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) SAN FRANCISCO — The number of privately held Silicon Valley start-ups that are worth more than $1 billion shocks even the executives running those companies.

“I thought we were special,” said Phil Libin, chief executive of Evernote, an online consumer service for storing clippings, photos and bits of information as he counted his $1 billion-plus peers.
He started Evernote in 2008 on the eve of the recession and built it methodically. “A lot of us didn’t set out to have a big valuation, we’re just trying to build something that lasts,” Mr. Libin said. “There is no safe industry anymore, even here.”
. . .
(p. B2) Silicon Valley entrepreneurs contend that the price spiral is not a sign of another tech bubble. The high prices are reasonable, they say, because innovations like smartphones and cloud computing will remake a technology industry that is already worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
. . .
The founders of the highly valued companies are old enough to remember past busts, and many shun the bubble lifestyle of fast cars and fancy parties.
Mr. Libin, who said he grew up on food stamps as the son of Russian immigrants in the Bronx, became a millionaire when he sold his first company, Engine5, to Vignette in 2000.
“The company I sold to, there were purple Lamborghinis in the garage. I got into watches,” he said. “Maybe a half-dozen, nothing over $10,000, but I needed this glass and leather watch winder.”
Evernote started as the financial crisis hit. “One night I was almost busted again,” he said, “and there was that watch winder on the shelf, mocking me.”
“Every job out there is insecure now,” he said. “People sell 10 percent of their stock, and they have an incentive to make the other 90 percent worth more. They are still working, but not worrying about what will happen to their home or their kids.”

Open Systems Limit the Integrated Vision that Creates Great Products

The following passage is Steve Jobs speaking, as quoted by Walter Isaacson.

(p. 568) People pay us to integrate things for them, because they don’t have the time to think about this stuff 24/7. If you have an extreme passion for producing great products, it pushes you to be integrated, to connect your hardware and your software and content management. You want to break new ground, so you have to do it yourself. If you want to allow your products to be open to other hardware or software, you have to give up some of your vision.

Source:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Steve Jobs: “Never Rely on Market Research”

The following passage is Steve Jobs speaking, as quoted by Walter Isaacson.

(p. 567) Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!'” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.

Source:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Google’s Eric Schmidt Saw that “Regulation Prohibits Real Innovation”

(p. A13) Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, gave a remarkable interview this month to The Washington Post. So remarkable that Post editors preceded the transcript with this disclosure: “He had just come from the dentist. And he had a toothache.”
Perhaps it was the Novocain talking, but Mr. Schmidt has done us a service. He said in public what most technologists will say only in private. Whatever caused him to speak forthrightly about the disconnects between Silicon Valley and Washington, his comments deserve wider attention.
Mr. Schmidt had just given his first congressional testimony. He was called before the Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee to answer allegations that Google is a monopolist, a charge the Federal Trade Commission is also investigating.
“So we get hauled in front of the Congress for developing a product that’s free, that serves a billion people. OK? I mean, I don’t know how to say it any clearer,” Mr. Schmidt told the Post. “It’s not like we raised prices. We could lower prices from free to . . . lower than free? You see what I’m saying?”
. . .
“Regulation prohibits real innovation, because the regulation essentially defines a path to follow,” Mr. Schmidt said. This “by definition has a bias to the current outcome, because it’s a path for the current outcome.”
. . .
Washington is always slow to recognize technological change, which is why in their time IBM and Microsoft were also investigated after competing technologies had emerged.
Mr. Schmidt recounted a dinner in 1995 featuring a talk by Andy Grove, a founder of Intel: “He says, ‘This is easy to understand. High tech runs three times faster than normal businesses. And the government runs three times slower than normal businesses. So we have a nine-times gap.’ All of my experiences are consistent with Andy Grove’s observation.”
Mr. Schmidt explained there was only one way to deal with this nine-times gap, which this column hereby christens “Grove’s Law of Government.” That is “to make sure that the government does not get in the way and slow things down.”
Mr. Schmidt recounted that when Silicon Valley first started playing a large role in the economy in the 1990s, “all of a sudden the politicians showed up. We thought the politicians showed up because they loved us. It’s fair to say they loved us for our money.”
He contrasted innovation in Silicon Valley with innovation in Washington. “Now there are startups in Washington,” he said, “founded by people who were policy makers. . . . They’re very clever people, and they’ve figured out a way in regulation to discriminate, to find a new satellite spectrum or a new frequency or whatever. They immediately hired a whole bunch of lobbyists. They raised some money to do that. And they’re trying to innovate through regulation. So that’s what passes for innovation in Washington.”

For the full commentary, see:
L. GORDON CROVITZ. “INFORMATION AGE; Google Speaks Truth to Power; About the growing regulatory state, even Google’s Eric Schmidt–a big supporter of the Obama administration–now feels the need to tell it like it is.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., October 24, 2011): A13.
(Note: ellipses between paragraphs added; ellipsis internal to Schmidt quote, in original WSJ commentary.)

The original Eric Schmidt interview with the Washington Post, can be read at:
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-10-01/national/35278181_1_google-chairman-eric-schmidt-regulation-disconnects

Entrepreneur Kurzweil Says If He Gets Cancer, He Will Invent a Cure

“Ray Kurzweil.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 12) As a futurist, you are famous for making predictions of when technological innovations will actually occur. Are you willing to predict the year you will die?
My plan is to stick around. We’ll get to a point about 15 years from now where we’re adding more than a year every year to your life expectancy.

To clarify, you’re predicting your immortality.
The problem is I can’t get on the phone with you in the future and say, “Well, I’ve done it, I have lived forever,” because it’s never forever.
. . .
You’ve said that if you woke up one day with a terminal disease, you’d be forced to invent a cure. Were you being serious?
I absolutely would try. I’m working now on a cancer project with some scientists at M.I.T., and if I develop cancer, I do have some ideas of what I would do.
I imagine a lot of people would hear that and say, Ray, if you think you’re capable of curing yourself, why don’t you go ahead and start curing others?
Well, I mean, I do have to pick my priorities. Nobody can do everything. What we spend our time on is probably the most important decision we make. I don’t know if you’re aware, but I’m joining Google as director of engineering.

For the full interview, see:
Andrew Goldman, Interviewer. “TALK; The Life Robotic; The Futurist Ray Kurzweil Says We’re Going to Live Forever. Really.” The New York Times Magazine (Sun., January 27, 2013): 12.
(Note: ellipsis added; bold in original, indicating interviewer questions.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date January 25, 2013, and has the title “TALK; Ray Kurzweil Says We’re Going to Live Forever.”)

Apple’s Corporate Culture Under Jobs: “Accountability Is Strictly Enforced”

(p. 531) In theory, you could go to your iPhone or any computer and access all aspects of your digital life. There was, however, a big problem: The service, to use Jobs’s terminology, sucked. It was complex, devices didn’t sync well, and email and other data got lost randomly in the ether. “Apple’s MobileMe Is Far Too Flawed to Be Reliable,” was the headline on Walt Mossberg’s review in the Wall Street Journal.
Jobs was furious. He gathered the MobileMe team in the auditorium on the Apple campus, stood onstage, and asked, “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” After the team members offered their answers, Jobs shot back: “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?” Over the next half hour he continued to berate them. “You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation,” he said. You should hate each other for having let each other down. Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing good things about us.” In front of the whole audience, he got rid of the leader of the MobileMe team and replaced him with Eddy Cue, who oversaw all Internet content at Apple. As Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky reported in a dissection of the Apple corporate culture, “Accountability is strictly enforced.”

Source:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

The Universality of Values: Every Kid Wants a Cell Phone

(p. 528) When they got to Istanbul, . . . [Jobs] hired a history professor to give his family a tour. At the end they went to a Turkish bath, where the professor’s lecture gave Jobs an insight about the globalization of youth:

I had a real revelation. We were all in robes, and they made some Turkish coffee for us. The professor explained how the coffee was made very different from anywhere else, and I realized, “So fucking what?” Which kids even in Turkey give a shit about Turkish coffee? All day I had looked at young people in Istanbul. They were all drinking what every other kid in the world drinks, and they were wearing clothes that look like they were bought at the Gap, and they are all using cell phones. They were like kids everywhere else. It hit me that, for young people, this whole world is the same now. When we’re making products, there is no such thing as a Turkish phone, or a music player that young people in Turkey would want that’s different from one young people elsewhere would want. We’re just one world now.

Source:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
(Note: ellipsis and bracketed “Jobs” added; indented Jobs block quote was indented in the original.)

Steve Jobs Viewed Patents as Protecting Property Rights in Ideas

(p. 512) . . . Apple filed suit against HTC (and, by extension, Android), alleging infringement of twenty of its patents. Among them were patents covering various multi-touch gestures, swipe to open, double-tap to zoom, pinch and expand, and the sensors that determined how a device was being held. As he sat in his house in Palo Alto the week the lawsuit was filed, he became angrier than I had ever seen him:

Our lawsuit is saying, “Google, you fucking ripped off the iPhone, wholesale ripped us off.” Grand theft. I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death, because they know they are guilty. Outside of Search, Google’s products–Android, Google Docs–are shit.

A few days after this rant, Jobs got a call from Schmidt, who had resigned from the Apple board the previous summer. He suggested they get together for coffee, and they met at a café in a Palo Alto shopping center. “We spent half the time talking about personal matters, then half the time on his perception that Google had stolen Apple’s user interface designs,” recalled Schmidt. When it came to the latter subject, Jobs did most of the talking. Google had ripped him off, (p. 513) he said in colorful language. “We’ve got you red-handed,” he told Schmidt. “I’m not interested in settling. I don’t want your money. If you offer me $5 billion, I won’t want it. I’ve got plenty of money. I want you to stop using our ideas in Android, that’s all I want.” They resolved nothing.

Source:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Apple’s iTunes for Windows Gave “a Glass of Ice Water to Somebody in Hell”

(p. 463) Mossberg wanted the evening joint appearance to be a cordial discussion, not a debate, but that seemed less likely when Jobs unleashed a swipe at Microsoft during a solo interview earlier that day. Asked about the fact that Apple’s iTunes software for Windows computers was extremely popular, Jobs joked, “It’s like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell.”
So when it was time for Gates and Jobs to meet in the green room before their joint session that evening, Mossberg was worried. Gates got there first, with his aide Larry Cohen, who had briefed him about Jobs’s remark earlier that day. When Jobs ambled in a few minutes later, he grabbed a bottle of water from the ice bucket and sat down. After a moment or two of silence, Gates said, “So I guess I’m the representative from hell.” He wasn’t smiling. Jobs paused, gave him one of his impish grins, and handed him the ice water. Gates relaxed, and the tension dissipated.

Source:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

A Well-Researched Case Study on How Mulally Saved Ford

Source of book image: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/04/01/business/01-SHELF/01-SHELF-articleInline.jpg

(p. C12) Tomes by management gurus telling you how to remake your company are a dime a dozen. Well-researched case studies are much rarer. In “American Icon,” Bryce G. Hoffman takes a careful look at how Alan Mulally, recruited from Boeing in 2006, restructured Ford Motor Co. in the midst of the steepest economic downturn since the 1930s. An engineer with no automotive background, Mr. Mulally came into a company on the verge of collapse and brought it back with insistent demands for accountability, information-sharing and tough decisions. Mr. Hoffman, who wrote this book with the company’s cooperation, provides a fascinating and detailed examination of how a dynamic leader brought about change. He makes clear that much of the credit goes to others, not least Don Leclair, then the chief financial officer, who, even before Mr. Mulally’s arrival, was arranging to mortgage everything up to Ford’s blue-oval trademark to amass the $23.6 billion in cash that enabled the company to survive the recession.

For the full review essay, see:
Marc Levinson. “Boardroom Reading of 2012.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., December 15, 2012): C12.
(Note: the online version of the review essay has the date December 14, 2012.)

The book under review, is:
Hoffman, Bryce G. American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company. New York: Crown Business, 2012.