Conference attendee Sergio Miranda holds up a sign about the absence of Apple CEO Steve Jobs at the Macworld Conference and Expo in San Francisco, Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2009. (AP)
If you’re looking for symbols of American innovation and technology savvy, they don’t get much bigger than Steve Jobs and Apple.
But at the annual MacWorld Expo, which ended yesterday in San Francisco, the biggest story was that Apple’s great impresario, CEO Jobs, wasn’t there. He’s been looking gaunt in recent photos and this week spoke openly about health problems.
There was no new barnburner, like the iPod or iPhone, at Macworld this week. And at a time when the economy needs innovation all over, some of those iPods and iPhones look like baubles of the bubble.
This hour, On Point: Apple, Steve Jobs, and the state of American innovation.
You can join the conversation. Are you watching the Apple-Jobs saga with bated breath? Does it matter to you? And are you still in the market for hip new products? Or has this economy killed your appetite for the hot new thing?
-Tom Ashbrook
Guests:
Joining us from Palo Alto, California, is Steven Levy, senior writer for Wired magazine. He’s been covering the Macworld conference in San Francisco, and has covered Apple from its early years. His book “Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything,” came out in 1994. His new piece on Apple, “25 Years of Mac: From Boxy Beige to Silver Sleek,” appears in Wired’s January issue.
From Las Vegas, we’re joined by Kara Swisher, co-executive editor of The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital, based in San Francisco. She started covering digital issues for the Journal’s San Francisco bureau in 1997 and wrote the BoomTown column. She’s been in Vegas this week attending the annual CES conference.
And we’re joined by Bill Joy, co-founder and longtime chief scientist of Sun Microsystems. He is now a partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. A cover story in Fortune magazine once called him the “Edison of the Internet.” He joins us from aboard the S/Y Ethereal, a new eco-friendly yacht he owns with his wife. They have been doing trial runs in the North Sea and are now docked in the port of Harlingen, Holland.
The place to look for real innovation is in open source. Apple has done a great job with interface design, but many of their innovations have consistently been copied from open source projects, and then polished a little more for the consumer. I think any vacuum in the consumer space create by a faltering Apple will quickly be filled by companies that can take open source technology, and package and support it in a way that works for consumers. The boom in netbook sales demonstrates the potential in this area.
Posted by Asa, on January 9th, 2009 at 11:10 AMThe MacWorld Expo timing makes no sense. Announcing new products after the holiday season at an event not orchestrated by Apple seems totally pointless.
How about iTunes music pricing changes? That was big news! And the sale of DRM-free items? I was hoping for a tablet personally or maybe a netbook at $600 (in my dreams.)
Posted by Majawill, on January 9th, 2009 at 11:18 AMMicro-loans, micro-businesses, $400 laptops—the future is bottom up, not top down. The Internet permits small to flourish. After getting reamed from the top (i.e., from mammoth financial institutions), the individual entrepreneur empowered by technology is riding to the rescue.
Posted by Noreen, on January 9th, 2009 at 11:38 AMBill Joy just said that it would take half a trillion dollars to develop the infrastructure to produce and deliver enough domestically produced to end oil imports. That figure is not much more than the defense department’s annual budget. Sounds like a worthwhile investment to me!
Posted by Harry, on January 9th, 2009 at 11:40 AMI upgraded to Leopard which has this thing called time machine. Great idea except it does not work.
It has a major bug in it that Apple refuses to deal with.
I have a 140 gigabyte external hard drive and I have only 74 gigabytes being used and yet I keep getting a message that there is not enough room on the drive to make it a backup drive. I have used larger drives to see if the problem was that you needed a drive that was equal to the internal drive. Nope, none of this works. Time Machine is a joke and Apple will not address it.
Other than that it’s a great product.
Posted by jeff, on January 9th, 2009 at 11:41 AMHello,
What is the percentage of Americans actually working for the research and development sides of Apple and companies like it? To me, someone born in another country but living here is certainly an American, but if they never went through our abysmal primary and secondary education systems, can we really claim their success as proof of American ingenuity and brains?
Thanks,
Posted by Cabiria, on January 9th, 2009 at 11:43 AMCabiria
Actually, I like the idea about training out-of-work journalists to install insulation, solar panels, and so on. Some of us old editors and writers are looking for new skills; the days of working in the publishing business, which laughs at people over 50, are fading fast.
On another note, I hope our new president at some point spends a few minutes with Bill Joy. I had the chance to interview him years ago; he is brilliant and far-sighted.
Keep up the great work, Tom. You’ve got the best show on radio.
- Unemployed editor, New York City
Posted by D Barker, on January 9th, 2009 at 11:43 AM…a persons health is a private issue ..
i use a mac and i love it …
i hope steves health is not too serious ..
happy old new year .
Posted by john oleary, on January 9th, 2009 at 11:50 AMI gotta laugh at the caller that suggested we use “technology” to train college graduates to do plumbing, carpentry, etc. One great thing about the post-industrial revolution has been the ability to get people out of the freezing cold and into nice, warm offices. I run a plumbing company retrofitting oil boilers to gas (I recommend the German made ones as the most efficient). I told my son to major in Resource Economics in college which he did. After graduating he discovered that the major gas companies had outsourced their Demand Side Analysis departments to India. He’s working with me as a Plumbing Apprentice now.
Posted by Letty, on January 9th, 2009 at 12:00 PMNice show. I’ve been impressed by the resurgence of Apple in recent years, and I’m hopeful for the future of Apple. Think different, adapt and survive, I say.
Posted by Lynn, on January 9th, 2009 at 12:02 PMThe thing that seems to come up again and again is that few really get the vision of Steve Jobs and Apple. The media focuses all too often on the failures and not enough on the profound impact that Apple is having on the consumer computing space. Many of us watched and loved the Jetsons as kids. Apple is bringing us closer to that elegant reality of the future than any other computing or technology company by far. Those in the inner circle keep looking for the building where Steve Jobs has hidden his Time Machine. He’s really uncannily prescient in his ability to know where we’re going.
Apple is not Dell, it’s not Sony, it’s not anything we’re used to. It is THE force of innovation in this space and we should all buy a LOT of stock in the company and let it do it’s thing while Dell and HP try to figure out how to make a $200 computer that doesn’t fall apart.
Posted by Mick, on January 9th, 2009 at 11:53 PMSometimes I wonder why Apple and Steve Jobs gets so much attention and love from people while Microsoft and Bill Gates sometimes appear to recieve the opposite. Obviously Steve Jobs is a genius but Bill Gates has created possibly the largest philantropic organization in the history of mankind with his fortune while Steve Jobs has done little to nothing with his. See this article:
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2006/01/70072
Posted by Stephen, on January 11th, 2009 at 3:02 PM[...] in which Wired Magazine’s Steven Levy and others read the tea leaves in the wake of all the rumors and rumblings coming from [...]
Posted by iPhone WBUR and NPR and KQED and WBEZ and WNYC and… « The ConverStation, on January 14th, 2009 at 9:55 PM[...] in which Wired Magazine’s Steven Levy and others read the tea leaves in the wake of all the rumors and rumblings streaming out of [...]
Posted by iPhone WBUR and NPR and KQED and WBEZ and WNYC and… « The ConverStation, on January 14th, 2009 at 11:38 PM