Steve Jobs Tells Startup Startup To Change Names, Saying 'It's No Big Deal'

from the to-you-perhaps... dept

Reader mick alerts us to the story of a small eight-person startup that makes a popular app for backing up your iPod music, which had been called "iPodRip" until Steve Jobs and Apple's lawyers got involved, demanding the company cease using the name and hand over its domain. It's even told the guy that even if he rebrands his app, he can't even say that it's the app "formerly known as" iPodRip. While lawyers told him he could successfully fight Apple on this, the guy gave in and is in the process of changing the name to iRip. Someone involved with the company actually sent Steve Jobs an email about the whole situation, and got the response:

"Change your apps name. Not that big of a deal."

Pleasant. Of course, at this point it seems worth pointing out that years long battle Jobs fought with the Beatles' Apple Corp. over the "Apple" name. Would Jobs have been okay if John, Paul, Ringo and George had simply told him "Change your company name. Not that big of a deal"? Now, yes, it is true that a company needs to enforce its trademark, lest it become generic, but in this case it certainly seems like the name was descriptive in a way that certainly didn't imply endorsement from Apple. But, of course, when you've got lawyers who can bully on your behalf, the details apparently aren't that important.

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One More Thing: Jobs Isn't Coming To Macworld

from the RIP-trade-shows dept

Mac fanboys cried themselves to sleep Tuesday night with the news that Steve Jobs won't be giving any more Macworld keynotes, while Apple won't even attend the event after the January installment. There's a lot of speculation that Steve Jobs' health is behind the move, as rumors about his recovery from pancreatic cancer continue to swirl. But the more likely reason is that, like many companies, Apple's getting tired of trade shows. For many companies, the expense and complexity of exhibiting at huge shows, then having to compete with hundreds or thousands of other companies for press and industry attention, are making the shows less and less compelling. Lots of companies -- including Apple -- are instead focusing on their own events for product launches. And, of course, given Apple's penchant for control, it's hardly surprising that the company would want to go down this route. But the bigger point remains: huge trade shows used to be a great idea when physical proximity was a real barrier to business and newsgathering. But communication has gotten simpler and cheaper, travel has become much more commonplace and things like blogs and social networks give people easy ways to meet other folks in their industry, making these huge gatherings more a hassle than anything else. Meanwhile, smaller, more manageable and focused events seem to be thriving, indicating that it's the large-scale format that's getting long in the tooth.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Turning Down A Chance To Own 10% Of Apple

from the have-any-regrets? dept

Computer Shopper is running an article, written by the magazine's first editor, Stan Veit, talking about his experience running a small computer store in NY and dealing with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak before Apple was even a company -- when they were pushing him to sell their Apple I machines (which were more computer boards than complete machines at the time). But the most amusing part is Steve Jobs' offer to give him 10% of the company in exchange for $10,000. It's an entertaining look into some of the very, very early days of Apple (when Woz was still working at HP). As for the opportunity (which Veit turned down) to invest, well, there's a bit of a twist at the very end of the article, care of Woz's mom.

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Killing The iPhone Kill Switch

from the inevitable dept

Well, it was really only a matter of time. After Steve Jobs confirmed that Apple had included an application "kill switch" in the new iPhone to disable any app it wanted remotely, someone was bound to kill the kill switch. And, indeed, apps are popping up that will let you disable the kill switch -- though only on a "jail broken" iPhone. Still, it does make you wonder how useful the kill switch really is when it can be so easily disabled.

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iPhone Shows That Cheaper Phones Are Still Important

from the price-is-important dept

The iPhone has received plenty of well-deserved (and plenty of not-so-well-deserved) hype and press over the past year or so, but one of the key points that Apple tried to make when it launched was that a premium phone deserved a premium price -- and people would pay for it, even without a massive subsidy from a mobile operator, as is typical of other phones. And, while there definitely was a huge crush of Apple fans who had to buy the iPhone early, the fact that Steve Jobs quickly lopped $200 off the price, just months after it was introduced, suggested that the number of people willing to pay that kind of premium wasn't as much as expected. In today's keynote, as was widely predicted, Jobs launched the new 3G iPhones with another $200 cut off the price, so the base model with 8gigs is now $199 -- down into the range of your typical subsidized smartphone.

While the iPhone has done plenty to get people to rethink mobile interfaces, it seems clear that Apple may have initially misjudged how people would respond to premium-priced phones. Jobs had promised 10 million iPhones sold in the first 18 months, and has reached about 5 million in the first 12 months (nothing to sneeze at, obviously). However, to get up to that 10 million number, he had to drop the price to be competitive with other phones. It's a smart move (though, it's not clear if the $199 is subsidized or not), given the market conditions, but beyond the lessons that everyone will talk about concerning Steve Jobs' strategy in launching the iPhone, the most interesting of all may be how the initial pricing structure backfired -- but was changed so quickly.

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Steve Jobs Back To Being A Fan Of DRM In iPhone 'Bundle'?

from the let's-pretend-we're-bundling-music... dept

This has been rumored for some time, but the Financial Times is reporting that Apple is trying to negotiate with the record labels for a new offering that would provide access to music as a bundle with an iPhone. The idea is that you could buy the iPhone and get "unlimited" access to music, either in a lump sum or with a subscription fee. Of course, there are some rather important caveats. While this would get a lot of attention, you only get access to the music for the lifetime of the device or subscription (if you didn't pay a lump sum). While there's a small concession that you'd get to keep 40 to 50 songs after the device died or the subscription ended, you'd lose the rest of the songs. In other words, despite Steve Jobs' supposed dislike for DRM, this music would be quite DRM'd. Limited subscription plans have been around for ages and they've never gone very far because of those limitations. People know better by now, and so should Steve Jobs.

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Apple Seeks To Patent 'Anti-Piracy' Technology. Will Steve Jobs Be Dumb Enough To Use It?

from the counterproductive dept

PCWorld alerts us to an application filed by Apple for a patent titled "Run-time code injection to perform checks." In a nutshell, it covers an operating system periodically checking running applications to determine whether they're pirated, and shutting them down if they are. Now, it should be kept in mind that the fact that Apple has filed a patent application doesn't prove that it will be used (or that it will be granted). To the contrary, companies routinely patent ideas they never intend to implement just so they will have more ammunition in future patent battles. As Microsoft discovered, systems like the one described in the patent inevitably produce false positives, and disabling a paying customer's copy of your product is much worse than allowing a non-paying customer to use it. Moreover, such tools do little to stop piracy, because inevitably someone finds a way to get around them, and news of the workaround quickly spreads around the Internet. So as a result, these kinds of "anti-piracy" programs mostly serve to annoy paying customers, who have to endure slower system performance and periodic "piracy checks" to verify that, yes, they're still paying customers. Thus far, Apple has differentiated itself from Redmond by declining to incorporate significant copy protection in its operating systems. That's given them a key marketing advantage, and I rather doubt Jobs would want to throw that advantage away in a futile attempt to stop piracy.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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The New York Times Eats Out Of Steve Jobs's Hand

from the reality-distortion-field dept

The New York Times has an interview with Steve Jobs about Apple's plans for Mac OS X over the next decade, and it appears that Jobs had his famous Reality Distortion Field cranked up to full power. In the interview, Jobs says "I'm quite pleased with the pace of new operating systems every 12 to 18 months for the foreseeable future," he said. "We've put out major releases on the average of one a year." The story then notes that Microsoft took "almost seven years" between XP and Vista, and notes that the next version of Windows is slated for 2010. The reporter states that "At Apple's current pace, it will have introduced two new versions of its operating system by then." Now maybe I'm bad at math, but I'm pretty sure that recent versions of Mac OS X haven't been released a year or even 18 months apart. The last version of Mac OS X was released two and a half years ago, and the one before that was released four years ago this week. So Apple has actually be averaging about 2 years per release, suggesting that "at Apple's current pace," they would release 10.6 (or whatever it's called) in October 2009, and 10.7 in October 2011. On the other hand, if you think the next version of Windows will be out before the end of the decade, I've got some real estate in Florida you might be interested in.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Bill Gates Damns Zune With Faint Praise

from the the-anti-Jobs dept

By now, most people are aware of the "reality distortion field" that surrounds Steve Jobs. Folks attending his keynotes or product launches talk about how it's almost a religious experience, where he really does make you feel like the latest iPod nano is the greatest device ever invented. It's no secret that Bill Gates has a rather different personality -- but it's still quite bizarre to see the level of faint praise Gates gives the Zune as its second generation launches:

"For something we pulled together in six months, we are very pleased with the satisfaction we got.... It was just so-so on the software side. I'm sure a year from now we'll do even better."

He does insist that the satisfaction was "superhigh," but satisfaction and passion are two very different beasts. Of course, this fits right in with how Microsoft has attacked this problem from the beginning: designing the product by committee, rather than coming up with something that they can be passionate about. When even your CEO can't show much passion about your products (especially when those products are up against Steve Jobs' latest products), you've got a problem.

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Apple Sued For Cutting iPhone Price

from the iFrivolous dept

Apple certainly surprised a lot of people last month with its sudden and steep price cuts on the iPhone. It certainly isn't a surprise that technology prices drop over time -- but to have them drop by a third after just two months seemed a bit extreme. While some early adopters just shrugged and figured it was the price of getting the device first, others weren't too thrilled about it. Apple quickly decided to fork over $100 credit to upset early adopters, but apparently that wasn't enough to satisfy one litigious individual who has decided to sue Apple, AT&T and Steve Jobs personally over the price cuts. It's difficult to see how you can sue a company for cutting its prices (especially on such a high-priced item in a competitive market), and the details suggest this case won't get very far. The key to the lawsuit seems to be the highly questionable claim that Apple cut the prices in order to make life difficult for anyone who was trying to resell an iPhone at profit. There's also some ridiculousness about how the 2-year contract with AT&T is unfair because those who bought phones at a later date could unlock them using 3rd party software. Of course, that has nothing to do with Apple or AT&T -- and the recent iBricking certainly suggests that such a claim won't hold much weight in court. All in all, this sounds like a typical "I don't like it, so I'll sue" response, when there's simply no actual legal basis for the lawsuit.

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