RIP Flash for Android

Steve Jobs - Thoughts on Flash – was right!

From T.C. Sottek – Flash for Android dies tomorrow, long live the 'full web experience':

In November of last year, Adobe made a surprising about-face on its popular Flash plugin, announcing that it would stop development of Flash for mobile devices. Tomorrow, Adobe will disable new installs of Flash on Android, effectively cutting it off from the future of the mobile web — despite the company's historical assertion that Flash would enable the "full web experience" on mobile devices. Instead, Adobe surrendered the major mobile battlegrounds and pledged allegiance to HTML5.

Steve Jobs on Higher Education

It's a little long and clearly dated, but very interesting to here Setve Jobs thoughts on higher ed.

elearningpost » Steve Jobs on Higher Education:

Interesting to see what Steve had in mind for higher education when making plans for NeXT Computer. Simulations and the learning experience were high on his agenda.

Disrupting the Textbook Market

Jeffrey Young details Steve Jobs' plans for the textbook market. It's a shame he'll never get an opportunity – I love love to see this market disrupted like the other markets Apple has disrupted. Steve Jobs Had Hopes of Disrupting Textbook Market:

The late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had discussed plans to shake up the textbook industry, including an effort that would have included free textbooks with iPads, according to a biography released this week.

“Jobs had his sights set on textbooks as the next business he wanted to transform,” says a passage in the new book, Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson. It notes that Jobs said he had met with several major textbook publishers, including Pearson. It appears that his primary focus was on the K-12 textbook market. “The process by which states certify textbooks is corrupt,” Mr. Jobs is quoted as saying. “But if we can make the textbooks free, and they come with the iPad, then they don’t have to be certified. The crappy economy at the state level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save money.”

Mr. Jobs was less keen on the power of his products to change other aspects of education, according to the book. Rupert Murdoch said that during a dinner he had with Mr. Jobs recently, the Apple co-founder was “somewhat dismissive” of technology’s ability to transform education.

Several colleges, meanwhile, have embraced the iPad tablet computer, starting pilot projects to use them in teaching.

A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs

very moving

A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs

(Via daringfireball.net/)

Focus on the Student (Customer)

Great advice for higher ed – rather than focusing on enrollment growth (code for revenue) focus on students, adding value and the student experience and the growth will follow.

Also, don't be afraid to cannibalize or disrupt your own business - rather you than someone else.

Steve Jobs Solved the Innovator’s Dilemma:

James Allworth:

They can do it because Apple hasn’t optimized its organization to maximize profit. Instead, it has made the creation of value for customers its priority. When you do this, the fear of cannibalization or disruption of one’s self just melts away. In fact, when your mission is based around creating customer value, around creating great products, cannibalization and disruption aren’t “bad things” to be avoided. They’re things you actually strive for — because they let you improve the outcome for your customer.

(Via Daring Fireball)

Jonathan Ive on Steve Jobs

The next time you're sharing ideas on your campus or in your community, think about this portion:

[ideas] begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished

From Philip Elmer-Dewitt Jonathan Ive on Steve Jobs and the fragility of ideas:

But for me the most touching part was Jony Ive's brief remarks -- in particular the things he had to say about Steve Jobs and the fragility of ideas:

Steve used to say to me -- and he used to say this a lot -- "Hey Jony, here's a dopey idea."

And sometimes they were. Really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But sometimes they took the air from the room and they left us both completely silent. Bold, crazy, magnificent ideas. Or quiet simple ones, which in their subtlety, their detail, they were utterly profound.

And just as Steve loved ideas, and loved making stuff, he treated the process of creativity with a rare and a wonderful reverence. You see, I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished.

Berners-Lee on Steve Jobs

Berners-Lee says Jobs made computing 'usable rather than infuriating':

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, has praised Steve Jobs for helping devise the machine that he used to write the software.

Berners-Lee wrote the code for the web while working at the physics research institute Cern in 1991, using a NeXT Computer - the company set up by Jobs after he was ejected from Apple in 1985.

In a post on his personal blog entitled "Steve Jobs and the actually usable computer", Berners-Lee - whom nobody would be likely to call naive or inexperienced with computers - says that "A big thing Steve Jobs did for the world was to insist that computers could be usable rather than totally infuriating".

Steve Jobs Advice to Educators

Another great tidbit from Jim Gianopulos.

A Studio Chief Pens Revealing First-Person Steve Jobs Remembrance:

I last spoke to Steve a few weeks ago when he called a couple of days after he had resigned from Apple. I had sent him an e-mail congratulating him for finally quitting his day job. He sounded frail but was still energetic and had lots of new ideas and plans. We talked for a while about politics, music, our families and, of course, business. At one point, he said: "Hey, do me a favor, will you? Don't let what happened to the music business happen to yours -- keep coming up with better ways to provide people with your content."[Emphasis added - MQ]

While this advice is focused on the movie business, it applies just as easily to higher education. The shift in how we teach and how students learn is already underway. How many of us are going to get left behind?

(Via daring fireball)

Steve Jobs on Presenting

Jim Gianopulos remembers Jobs advice when Gianopulos observed "I don't know how you do it, walking back and forth out there for an hour with no notes or teleprompter in front of all those people."

"It's easy, you just imagine you have a few friends sitting around your living room and you're telling them what's new."

(via A Studio Chief Pens Revealing First-Person Steve Jobs Remembrance)

That Doesn't Even Begin to Cover It

Chris Rawson reporting – Official cause of death for Steve Jobs released:

Steve Jobs's occupation on his death certificate was listed as "entrepreneur." That doesn't even begin to cover it.

Don't Let Your Competitors Cannibalize Your Business ...

… cannibalize it yourself.

Clay Christensen on Steve Jobs & the trouble with venture capital:

How much wisdom can one glean from a 20-minute chat withProfessor Clay Christensen? I would say — if one keeps his mouth shut and asks the right questions — a lot. Here are notable highlights from my chat with the famousHarvard Business School professor, founder of the Innosight Institute and author of such best selling books asThe Innovator’s DilemmaandDisrupting Class.

Jobs at hand

Steve Jobs and the company he co-founded just might be one of the few companies to look the innovator’s dilemma right in the eye and stare it into submission. Jobs’Apple decided that it was better to cannibalizeitself rather than have others do it. And so, the briskly selling iPod was replaced by the iPhone, and the iPad became the new low-end computer. When I asked Professor Christensen what made Jobs special, he said, “Jobs never said he understood the customer, but instead he tried to learn what they are trying to do, and that was his genius.”

 

The Teacher

Jean-Louis Gassee and Frederic Fillioux on Steve Jobs:

Steve Jobs taught us so many things…To us whose professional life strides tech, ads and media, his way of fostering innovation, of creating an obsessive culture of perfection remains both inspirational and enigmatic. For those who like design and engineering, there isn’t a single field Apple hasn’t entered — or at least influenced. When I fumble with the appalling multi-function display of my Prius, when I struggle with the remote control of my office A/C, or when I wonder why in hell the $2000 battery-assisted bicycle I consider buying doesn’t have an programmable memory chip to upgrade software that looks forever stuck in version 1.0, I wonder how the Cupertino guys would have handled it. Needless to say, I do the same when I look at media applications or newspapers/magazines designs, many of which seem to have succumbed to a sad mélange of sloppy execution and a lack of decisiveness in design.

...

However, over a span of fourteen years, as it impacted so many sectors, Apple’s unprecedented turnaround yielded a few clues.I tried to isolate some with potential applications outside the tech world. What interests me in Apple ranges from their choice of frosted-glass for my MacBookPro’s trackpad (instead of cheaper plastic), to the use of its immense cash hoard, to the way the company prepared itself for the post-Steve Jobs era.

Guy Kawasaki on Steve Jobs

"12 Lessons Steve Jobs Taught Guy Kawasaki" at SVB Financial Group:

Guy Kawasaki survived working for Steve Jobs twice. At Silicon Valley Bank's CEO Summit on October 6, 2011, Guy shared lessons learned from the entrepreneur of the 21st century.

Businessweek Magazine's Tribute to Steve Jobs

Businessweek Magazine's Classy Tribute to Steve Jobs

Looks really well done!

Who Inspires You?

For many young entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs, the answer would be Steve Jobs. A good piece in the New York Times by Christopher Bonanos on The Man Who Inspired Jobs:

IN the memorials toSteven P. Jobsthis week,Apple’s co-founder was compared with the world’s great inventor-entrepreneurs: Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Alexander Graham Bell. Yet virtually none of the obituaries mentioned the man Jobs himself considered hishero, the person on whose career he explicitly modeled his own: Edwin H. Land, the genius domus of Polaroid Corporation and inventor of instant photography.

Land, in his time, was nearly as visible as Jobs was in his. In 1972, he made the covers of bothTimeandLifemagazines, probably the only chemist ever to do so. (Instant photography was a genuine phenomenon back then, and Land had created the entire medium, once joking that he’d worked out the whole idea in a few hours, then spent nearly 30 years getting those last few details down.) And the more you learn about Land, the more you realize how closely Jobs echoed him.

Steve Jobs and the Reserved Seat

From Alex Heath – Steve Jobs and the Reserved Seat:

There will always be a seat reserved for you, Steve.

"Steve Jobs is an Exceptional Designer" - Jonathan Ive

In the past couple days, there have been reports to the contrary, but if Jonny Ive says Jobs was an exceptional designer, you can take it to the bank!

"Steve Jobs is an Exceptional Designer" -- Jonathan Ive

Steve Jobs Introduces WiFi to the World

… with a Tangerine iBook and a Hula hoop.

Is this a first? I'm not old enough to remember:)

Steve Jobs introduced wireless WiFi to the World:

Steve Jobs wakes the original Tangerine iBook from sleep and innocently demonstrates web surfing using the iBook; unbeknownst to everyone is that he is doing so wirelessly... until he picks up the iBook and continues to surf the internet while walking around the stage!

Watch for his enormous grin!

Steve Jobs comically demonstrates the wireless capabilities of the original iBook with a HULA HOOP!

This was the HISTORIC moment when most of the world was introduced to "wireless" (WiFi) - watch and listen as the sro crowd gets up on their feet and goes wild!

Steve Jobs, Technology, and Disabilities

Tim Carmody on how the technology of Steve Jobs' Apple had impacted his 4-year old autistic son. Amazing!

‘This Stuff Doesn’t Change the World’: Disability and Steve Jobs’ Legacy:

When I did tweet, thefirst semi-coherent thought I was able to write about Jobswas also about my son:

I’m on my way to PHL to see my son, who uses a device Steve Jobs invented to help him talk. He will never know. He will never know.

My son is on the autism spectrum and has a severe receptive and expressive language delay. He’s 4 years old, and can read and spell words, and sing entire songs, but is more like an 18-month- or 2-year-old in normal conversation. He cannot use a telephone and has a hard time sitting still for video telephony. He has a thoroughly well-loved iPod Touch, filled with videos and apps that have helped him learn to speak and augment his ability to communicate.

My tweet about my son wasretweeted almost 500 times, more than anything else I’ve ever written in 140 characters, and put me in touch with other parents of children with special needs — strangers — some seeking information, some wanting to share their stories.

It may be a stretch to say Steve Jobs invented the iPod Touch or most of the technologies contained in it. But Steve Jobs certainly put it in my son’s hands, both by making it a sub-$200 device (and in our case, giving it away free with a laptop) and by helping to create an ecosystem of software applications for people with disabilities — perhaps especially communication disabilities.

Steve Jobs and Xerox PARC

Great New Yorker article from Malcolm Gladwell. He dispels some of the myths and long-held beliefs regarding Jobs' visit to Xerox PARC. While Jobs was clearly inspired by what he saw, had he actually copied the work done by the engineers at Xerox PARC, the Macintosh likely would have been a failure.

gladwell dot com - creation myth:

This is the legend of Xerox PARC. Jobs is the Biblical Jacob and Xerox is Esau, squandering his birthright for a pittance. In the past thirty years, the legend has been vindicated by history. Xerox, once the darling of the American high-technology community, slipped from its former dominance. Apple is now ascendant, and the demonstration in that room in Palo Alto has come to symbolize the vision and ruthlessness that separate true innovators from also-rans. As with all legends, however, the truth is a bit more complicated.

…

The difference between direct and indirect manipulation—between three buttons and one button, three hundred dollars and fifteen dollars, and a roller ball supported by ball bearings and a free-rolling ball—is not trivial. It is the difference between something intended for experts, which is what Xerox PARC had in mind, and something that's appropriate for a mass audience, which is what Apple had in mind. PARC was building a personal computer. Apple wanted to build a popular computer.