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Excellent interview from 2010. Still worth reading. excerpt: "In December 2009 Jobs beckoned Houston (pronounced like the New York City street, not the Texas city) and his partner, Arash Ferdowsi, for a meeting at his Cupertino office. "I mean, Steve friggin' Jobs," remembers Houston, now 28. "How do you even prepare for that?" When Houston whipped out his laptop for a demo, Jobs, in his signature jeans and black turtleneck, coolly waved him away: "I know what you do." What Houston does is Dropbox, the digital storage service that has surged to 50 million users, with another joining every second. Jobs presciently saw this sapling as a strategic asset for Apple. Houston cut Jobs' pitch short: He was determined to build a big company, he said, and wasn't selling, no matter the status of the bidder (Houston considered Jobs his hero) or the prospects of a nine-digit price (he and Ferdowsi drove to the meeting in a Zipcar Prius). Jobs smiled warmly as he told them he was going after their market. "He said we were a feature, not a product," says Houston. Courteously, Jobs spent the next half hour waxing on over tea about his return to Apple, and why not to trust investors, as the duo-or more accurately, Houston, who plays Penn to Ferdowsi's mute Teller-peppered him with questions. When Jobs later followed up with a suggestion to meet at Dropbox's San Francisco office, Houston proposed that they instead meet in Silicon Valley. "Why let the enemy get a taste?" he now shrugs cockily. Instead, Jobs went dark on the subject, resurfacing only this June, at his final keynote speech, where he unveiled iCloud, and specifically knocked Dropbox as a half-attempt to solve the Internet's messiest dilemma: How do you get all your files, from all your devices, into one place? Houston's reaction was less cocky: "Oh, s-t." The next day he shot a missive to his staff: "We have one of the fastest-growing companies in the world," it b

Excellent must read!  Best explanation of what is currently driving Silicon Valley.  Charlie puts all the pieces in context, provides expert perspective, and then pushes everything forward to describe a highly probable future.  MUST READ stuff! excerpts:  I've got a theory, and it's this: Steve Jobs believes he's gambling Apple's future - the future of a corporation with a market cap well over US $200Bn - on an all-or-nothing push into a new market. HP have woken up and smelled the forest fire, two or three years late; Microsoft are mired in a tar pit, unable to grasp that the inferno heading towards them is going to burn down the entire ecosystem in which they exist. There is the smell of panic in the air, and here's why ... We have known since the mid-1990s that the internet was the future of computing.  With increasing bandwidth, data doesn't need to be trapped in the hard drives of our desktop computers: data and interaction can follow us out into the world we live in. .....Wifi and 4G protocols will shortly be delivering 50-150mbps to whatever gizmo is in your pocket, over the air. ......  It's easier to lay a single fat fibre to a radio transciever station than it is to lay lots of thin fibres to everybody's front door.... Anyway, here's Steve Jobs' strategic dilemma in a nutshell: the PC industry as we have known it for a third of a century is beginning to die. PCs are becoming commodity items. The price of PCs and laptops is falling by about 50% per decade in real terms, despite performance simultaneously rising in real terms. The profit margin on a typical netbook or desktop PC is under 10%.  At the same time, wireless broadband is coming. As it does so, organizations and users will increasingly move their data out into the cloud (read: onto hordes of servers racked up high in anonymous data warehouses, owned and maintained by some large corporation like Google). Software will be delivered as a service to users wherever they are, via whatev

Really interesting blog from Robert X.  Wealth through productivity vs wealth through accumulation and the important but seriously declining role of IPO's. excerpt: "Big business grows by economies of scale, economies of scale are gained by increasing efficiency, and increased efficiency in big business always - always - means creating more economic output with fewer people. More economic output is good, but fewer people is bad if you need 100,000 new jobs per month just to provide for normal U.S. population growth. This is the ultimate irony of policies that declare companies too big to fail when in fact they are more properly too big to survive. Our policy obsession with helping big business no matter which party is in power has been a major factor in our own economic demise because it doesn't create jobs. Our leaders and would-be leaders are really good at talking about the value of small and medium size businesses in America but really terrible about actually doing much to help. Now here comes the important part: if small businesses, young businesses, new businesses create jobs, then Initial Public Offerings create wealth. Wealth creation is just as important as job creation in our economy but too many experts get it wrong when they think wealth creation and wealth preservation are the same things, because they aren't." ................. The fundamental error of trickle-down (Supply Side) economics is that it is dependent on rich people spending money which they structurally can't do fast enough to matter, and philosophically won't do because their role in the food chain is about growth through accumulation, not through new production. ..............................................

I'm less than convinced that IPOs create wealth, in terms of the aggregate wealth of the nation. Most of the "wealth" created by IPOs goes to the previous owner's of the business, plus whatever speculators can maneuver to acquire through capital gains. But waving the "IPO wand" does not magically boost productivity, business outputs, or business profitability. So if "wealth" is created, it is faux wealth. I think Cringely ventures too far from what the real argument is about: levels of government taxation and creating jobs. Supply Side economics is in reality an argument against taxing the wealthy. But Cringely doesn't even touch on the taxation issue. I also do not agree with his "Steve Jobs created 50,000 new jobs" schtick because he does not take into account how many jobs were destroyed in the process. But modern information technology has unquestionably destroyed more jobs than it has created; the technology never would have succeeded had it not boosted individual productivity to a point that massive numbers of employees could be laid off. For example, remember the days when you could call a business and have a human being answer the phone and direct your call to the right person? That lady doesn't have that job anymore because of voice menu/mail technology. IT is all about doing more with fewer people. In the context of jobs and taxation levels, the fundamental error of Supply Side Economics is not the distinction between wealth accumulation and wealth creation. The real fundamental error is globalism, government policies that create enormous incentives to invest capital outside the U.S. Supply Side Economics simply blinks past that enormously inconvenient reality. To illustrate, let's try remodeling trickle-down economics in a way that has a prayer of producing more and better-paying jobs in the U.S. (Over-simplification warning.) -- The U.S. withdraws from all trade agreements standing in the way and repeals all laws inconsistent with the goal of

Good quotes.  The Wired article is also worth reading.  The important take away being that Apple is fully committed to native browser HTML5.  So is Google.  But, i found out at the Web 2.0 - WebKit party in 2009, there is quite a bit of tension between Apple WebKit and Google.  The problem being that Apple is doing all the work while Google is pumping up HTML5, Web Sockets and Native Client; all of which are essential to WebKit, but also to Chrome OS, Chrome, Android and the Google Apps push. excerpt:  According to Wired, at an Apple "town hall" meeting after the introduction of the Flashless iPad, Steve Jobs unloaded on Google, calling the search giant's "don't be evil" motto "bullshit," before rounding on Adobe. "They are lazy. They have all this potential to do interesting things, but they just refuse to do it," he said. "Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy... Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it's because of Flash. No one will be using Flash...The world is moving to HTML5."

I'm not convinced that iCloud will eliminate Windows, MAC and Linux desktops.  I've been using DropBox, SyncDocs, Live.com while testing a number of backup-store-synch-share file services. IMHO, it's all about the apps that act on your data.  And these can come from the desktop, the Browser, or the device.  The best app platform for Cloud hosted data seems to be moving towards HTML5-JS.  Not Win32, .NET, C#, Java or Cocoa (iOS).  And Google clearly has he best platform of integrated services and API's.  They are best positioned to win the Cloud Wars if HTM5-JS and Native Client can close the deal on Cloud apps.  IMHO. excerpt: Apple's announcements yesterday about OS X 10.7 pricing (cheap), upgrading (easy), iOS 5, and iCloud storage, syncing, and media service can all be viewed as increasing ease of use, but from the perspective of Apple CEO Steve Jobs they perform an even more vital function - killing Microsoft. Here is the money line from Jobs yesterday: "We're going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device - just like an iPad, an iPhone or an iPod Touch. We're going to move the hub of your digital life to the cloud." Just like they used to say at Sun Microsystems, the network is the computer. Or we could go even further and say our data is the computer. This redefines digital incumbency. The incumbent platform today is Windows because it is in Windows machines that nearly all of our data and our ability to use that data have been trapped. But the Apple announcement changes all that. Suddenly the competition isn't about platforms at all, but about data, with that data being crunched on a variety of platforms through the use of cheap downloaded apps.

Excellent but light weight and breezy review of the Flash-Silverlight-Open Web HTML5 battle for the future of the Web. excerpt: At the top of the org chart, Apple's deprecation of Flash technology is all about politics. Apple doesn't want its mainstream video delivery system controlled by a third party. So Mr. Jobs backs up his politics with tidbits of technical truths. However, discovering the real truths about HTML5 and Flash is a bit harder, as this survey shows. On February 11th, I wrote an editorial, "What Should Apple Do About Adobe?" Part of the discussion related to Adobe's Flash Player on the Mac, updates and security. Inevitably, the comments escalated to a discussion of Steve Job's distaste for and blocking of Flash on the iPhone and iPad. The question is: is Apple's stance against Flash justified? Of course, any political argument needs only the barest of idealogical arguments to sustain itself. More to the point is, can Apple fight this war and win based on the state-of-the-art with HTML5? Again, Apple's CEO must believe he can win this war. There has to be some technical basis for that, or the war wouldn't be waged.

I disagree with the authors conclusions here.  He misses some very significant developments.  Particularly around Google, WebKit, and WebKit-HTML5. For instance, there is this article out today; "Google Really is Giving Away Free Nexus One and Droid Handsets to Developers".  Also, Palm is working on a WiMAX/WiFi version of their WebOS (WebKit) smartphone for Sprint.  Sprint and ClearWire are pushing forward with a very aggressive WiMAX rollout in the USA.  San Francisco should go on line this year!   One of the more interesting things about the Sprint WiMAX plan is that they have a set fee of $69.00 per month that covers EVERYTHING; cellphone, WiMAX Web browsing, video, and data connectivity, texting (SMS) and VOIP.  Major Sprint competitors, Verizon, AT&T and TMobile charge $69 per month, but it only covers cellphone access.  Everything else is extra adn also at low speed/ low bandwidth.  3G at best.  WiMAX however is a 4G screamer.  It's also an open standard.  (Verizon FIOS and LTE are comparable and said to be coming soon, but they are proprietary technologies).   The Cable guys are itneresting in that they are major backers of WiMAX, but also have a bandwidth explosive technology called Docsis. There is an interesting article at TechCrunch, "In Mobile, Fragmentation is Forever. Deal With It."  I disagree entirely with the authors conclusion.  WebKit is capable of providing a universal HTML5 application developers layer for mobile and desktop browser computing.  It's supported by Apple, Google, Palm (WebOS), Nokia, RiMM (Blackberry) and others to such an extent that 85% of all smartphones shipped this year will either ship with WebKit or, an Opera browser compatible with the WebKit HTML5 document layout/rendering model.   I would even go as far as to say that WebKit-HTML5 owns the Web's document model and application layer for the future.  Excepting for Silverlight, which features the OOXML document model with over 500 million desktop develop

Excellent and well worth the time to read! Founder of DropBox tells his story and it's full of insight, wisdom and naked truth. excerpt: "I was going to say work on what you love, but that's not really it. It's so easy to convince yourself that you love what you're doing - who wants to admit that they don't? When I think about it, the happiest and most successful people I know don't just love what they do, they're obsessed with solving an important problem, something that matters to them. They remind me of a dog chasing a tennis ball: their eyes go a little crazy, the leash snaps and they go bounding off, plowing through whatever gets in the way. I have some other friends who also work hard and get paid well in their jobs, but they complain as if they were shackled to a desk. The problem is a lot of people don't find their tennis ball right away. Don't get me wrong - I love a good standardized test as much as the next guy, but being king of SAT prep wasn't going to be mine. What scares me is that both the poker bot and Dropbox started out as distractions. That little voice in my head was telling me where to go, and the whole time I was telling it to shut up so I could get back to work. Sometimes that little voice knows best. It took me a while to get it, but the hardest-working people don't work hard because they're disciplined. They work hard because working on an exciting problem is fun. So after today, it's not about pushing yourself; it's about finding your tennis ball, the thing that pulls you. It might take a while, but until you find it, keep listening for that little voice. "