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Oct 11 2011
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Apple Announces Plans to Release Steve Jobs 2.0

Jobs’ death has inspired an outpouring of grief from fans of iProducts the world over, the Onion hasn’t shied away from adding its own spin to the mass-appreciations and tributes to the beloved tech giant.

Headlines for videos and articles on the Onion carry such doozies as “Last Bastion of U.S. Economy Succumbs to Pancreatic Cancer,” “Apple User Acting Like His Dad Died” and “Last American Who Knew What the Fuck He Was Doing Dies.”

Most provocative of all is a web video entitled “Apple Announces Plans to Release Steve Jobs 2.0”

In many ways, the jokes inside are relatively tame, leaving most of the shock humor to the titles.

Among the flaws that Jobs 2.0 is supposed to fix, for instance, is the old Jobs habit of wearing “dad jeans.” The fresher model will sport a “sleek new white turtleneck” and a “richer, deeper voice.”

That hasn’t stopped some from failing to find the humor in the Onion’s Jobs jokes. Business Insider CEO and Editor-in-Chief Henry Blodget slammed the piece.

“Does anyone else NOT think this is funny? I think tasteless RT The Onion: Apple Announces Plans To Release Steve Jobs 2.0,” Blodget tweeted.

Others, such as the New Yorker, have also tried to inject a little levity into Jobs’ passing. The cover of this week’s magazine has Jobs being greeted at the pearly gates by an iPad wielding St. Peter, but that kind of humor is more aggrandizing than it is savage.

It’s not the first time, nor will it be the last, that the Onion has found itself in the position of trying to be funny about a tragic event. After all, their first New York issue after the company moved from Madison, Wisconsin to the big apple was originally scheduled to be published on September 11, 2001.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 pushed that date back, but even as the country was still reeling from the carnage, the Onion’s editors still managed to find the funny. Among the now classic headlines — “Highjackers Surprised to Find Selves in Hell.”

Looking back on it nearly a decade later, Onion writer John Krewson told Yahoo that the issue was “cathartic.”

Jobs death certainly isn’t on the scale of 9/11, but the makeshift memorials at Apple stores and the tributes that flooded Facebook and Twitter demonstrate that people across the globe felt a deep kinship with him.

Will the Onion prove that laughter is the best medicine for grief?

Update: Watch Jobs 2.0 by The Onion News Network

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Oct 10 2011
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Does Steve Jobs’s failings as a father affect his legacy?

Metro Parent wrote about Jobs:

At the time of his death, Apple innovator Steve Jobs was collaborating with Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer and former Time magazine editor Walter Isaacson on a tell-all biography. The book, which is on the publishing fast track as a result of the technology pioneer’s death, will be released on Oct. 24.

Steve Jobs shows off his sentiment by resting
It’s hardly a surprise since Apple devotees are certainly keen to get deeper insight into someone many are calling this generation’s Thomas Edison. Instead, according to Isaacson, Jobs was hoping the book would give his own kids a better insight into their father since he was rarely home.

“I wanted my kids to know me,” Isaacson quoted Jobs as saying in their final interview at Jobs’ home in California. “I wasn’t always there for them and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.”

It’s sad to think that any father – whether he’s an inventor or something else – would have to rely on someone or something to tell his kids who he was. Isn’t that what we are supposed to do every day as parents when we spend time with our children? Through those moments of driving them to school, playing board games or telling bedtime stories, we learn about our children and they learn about us.

And yet even though he acknowledges he was never father of the year to the three children he had with wife Laurene Powell Jobs. Laurene got her MBA from Stanford, cofounded Terravera, a natural foods manufacturer that delivers organic foods to over 300 retailers in Northern California. She is currently the cofounder and President of College Track, an afterschool college preparatory program for under-resourced high school students. At least he acknowledged they were his children.

In what is probably his most character-indicting biographical factoid, at age 23, Jobs had a child with high school girlfriend Chrisann Brennan that he denied was his. His child, Lisa, and her mother were on welfare even after he’d become wealthy, and yet he continued to deny paternity of Lisa and refused to help support her. He even went so far as to sign a court document that it was impossible for Lisa to be his child because he was sterile. Clearly, that wasn’t true, since he had three children later in life. Jobs did come around to recognize Lisa as his child when she was 6. According to Lisa, she became more a part of her father’s life in her teenage years. Lisa Brennan-Jobs is now 33 years old, and is a Harvard graduate and writer.

Steve Jobs’s epic fail as family man also made him a clueless employer when it comes to family balance. He was often cited as a tough boss who thought little of requiring his employees to work hours hardly conducive to raising a family.

“You’d be surprised how hard people work around here,” Jobs said in a 2004 interview with Businessweek. “They work nights and weekends, sometimes not seeing their families for a while. Sometimes people work through Christmas to make sure the tooling is just right at some factory in some corner of the world so our product comes out the best it can be.”

No doubt Steve Jobs’s dedication as an innovator, creator and entrepreneur is admirable, notable and exceptional. When it comes to technology and business, he taught us a lot. But as a father and as family man he was the one who had a lot to learn. Apparently, there was no app for that.

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Oct 09 2011
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Will Apple stay hungry without Steve Jobs?

Steve Jobs, the man who made “i” the most famous prefix in history, passed away… He was a true visionary and one of the greatest innovator of all time.

Steve JobsSteve Jobs, Apple Inc’s co-founder and former CEO who died last Wednesday after a long battle with pancreatic cancer, created a series of seminal electronics products, reinvented several industries, and built Apple into a $350 billion juggernaut.

Now big question is – Can Apple succeed without Jobs? Apple has plenty of new products in the pipeline, and there should be few bumps in the short term. But it’s not clear if Jobs’ brilliance — both as a product visionary and a super-salesman — was ultimately transferable.

Jobs’ health had been an issue with investors for years (he was diagnosed in 2004), but that has not stopped Apple shares from marching higher. The biggest factors affecting the stock currently are the reliability of its iPhone and iPad product pipeline, and how well the company wards off smartphone challenger Google Inc and burgeoning rival Amazon.com Inc.

As far as Jobs’ legacy is concerned, Jobs is counted among the greatest CEOs in history, mentioned in the same breath as Henry Ford and other historical giants of corporate America. One of his most unique achievements was vaulting Apple to world leadership not just once, but twice.

After co-founding the company with Steve Wozniak in 1976 and giving the world the Apple II and the Macintosh, he was famously pushed out in a clash with his hand-picked CEO, John Sculley. When Jobs returned in 1997 the floundering company’s survival was in doubt, but he proceeded to radically transform an aging computer-maker and take it in a new, and wildly successful, direction. There are few examples in any field of such a brilliant second act.

Along the way, Jobs in 1986 also bought Pixar, which was then little more than an experiment in digital animation technology. The company ultimately became a juggernaut of its own, and when it was acquired by Disney in 2006, Jobs became the largest shareholder of the entertainment giant. Again, there are few examples of a CEO turning a side project into a world-class innovator and business success story.

Jobs’ few critics say the Macintosh was mostly borrowed technology, and beyond that all Apple gave the world was a sleek cellphone and an improved music-player. But many people — in the tech world and beyond — believe his impact on society and culture was monumental. He prompted millions to embrace digital technology, online media and mobile communications in ways they never did before.

Will Apple change under Cook? While both Cook and Jobs have earned reputations as hard-driving perfectionists, Jobs’ successor is considered easier to work with. While Jobs was infamous for chewing out employees — multiple stories have him firing workers in the elevator — Cook is said to be better at forging consensus.

Who else is important to the company’s future success? Design guru Jonathan Ives, marketing chief Phil Schiller, and mobile-software head Scott Forstall are three of the most important players. Schiller filled in for Jobs on several product launches, and with Cook being more low-key by nature, Schiller may gain a higher public profile.
Thank you Jobs!

What will be Apple’s “Next Big Thing”?

There’s no shortage of speculation on what direction Cook will take Apple in, and whether Jobs had already laid the foundation for Apple’s “Next Big Thing”. For now, industry speculation centers around some sort of concerted attempt to shake up the living room, and TV. Apple has delivered results in the past by diving into fragmented, stagnating industries — notably music and telephones — and re-imagining them through technological innovation. Many experts say TV and its confusing array of options is ripe for an Apple-like “simple is beautiful” makeover.

(Reporting by Edwin Chan in Los Angeles, editing by Jonathan Weber, Bernard Orr)

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