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Steve Jobs Isn’t Coming Back This Time

Update 8/25/11: Looks like I was right about this one. I hope I’m right about Apple’s future too.
I’ve been thinking about Apple’s future lately from my viewpoint as a fan, a customer, and a shareholder (I have a very comfortable holding of Apple shares in my IRA), and I have come to the conclusion that Steve Jobs isn’t going to come back to the company as a CEO or any other meaningful role.

Last month, Jobs took an indefinite leave of absence from the company he founded and then saved from the brink of destruction. It was the second such medical leave he’d taken in recent years, the last one in 2009 when underwent a liver transplant. That leave lasted six months, a time frame he revealed at the start of his hiatus. However, the circumstances of his most recent leave were much more vague. Here is his letter to employees from January 2011:

At my request, the board of directors has granted me a medical leave of absence so I can focus on my health. I will continue as CEO and be involved in major strategic decisions for the company.

I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for all of Apple’s day to day operations. I have great confidence that Tim and the rest of the executive management team will do a terrific job executing the exciting plans we have in place for 2011.

I love Apple so much and hope to be back as soon as I can. In the meantime, my family and I would deeply appreciate respect for our privacy.

I don’t intend to speculate on Jobs’ personal life or invade his privacy, but I have a hunch that unlike his previous absence, this time Jobs’ leave is not temporary, but permanent. One of the biggest fears of fans of a healthy Apple Co. has been that Jobs’ admittedly serious medical condition could leave the company suddenly without the legendarily fearless and focused leader whose vision has saved Apple “singlehandedly” (which is perhaps an exaggeration and does not give enough credit to the team he has surrounded himself with). Many people fear that an Apple without Jobs would be rudderless and eventually become just another tech company producing mediocre products and focused on maximizing profits to the detriment of product design and quality. In other words, a return to Apple of the mid-Nineties.

Whether this is likely or not—and I tend to think it isn’t likely because people like Jonathan Ives, Tim Cook, and others at Apple are just as responsible for Apple’s amazing products and marketing as Jobs—the perception is what matters to Wall Street. And if Jobs were to leave suddenly, investors would abandon the stock in droves and the company would love the confidence of the market and the media alike. (Under Jobs’ tenure, every announcement from Apple is greeted by receptive and cynical media alike as a veritable pronouncement from upon high; the media coverage of the company is worthy of study in academia.)

But what if the company were able to prove over the long term that not only could it survive a post-Jobs era, but thrive?

I think Steve Jobs phrased his departure letter in an open-ended way so as not to panic the public at his absence, but for them to be able to say eventually, “Look at how well the company has performed in his absence. It doesn’t matter if he settles down to a well-deserved retirement.”

For as much as we would all selfishly love for Steve Jobs—or any other favored producer of the things we love—to continue performing their magic for us indefinitely, at some point we have to be willing to wish them well and let them enjoy the fruits of their labor.

I don’t particularly relish the idea of a Steve-less Apple, but I think that the day has already come. And I think Apple will be just fine.

Photo credit: Matt Buchanan via Wikimedia Commons.

Posted via email from Bettnetlog

What’s the real reason sales of picture books are languishing?

Are picture books declining in sales because parents are pushing kids to chapter books earlier or is there perhaps a simpler explanation? The New York Times story claims that sales of picture books are declining because parents—as in so many other areas of life—are pushing their kids to excel and advance more rapidly than normal development phases would suggest.

Parents have begun pressing their kindergartners and first graders to leave the picture book behind and move on to more text-heavy chapter books. Publishers cite pressures from parents who are mindful of increasingly rigorous standardized testing in schools.

But is that really the reason? Undoubtedly, it’s part of the cause, but it could also include the fact that so many of the new picture books that the book industry is dumping on the shelves at an alarming rate are just dreck and drivel. One reason to believe this may be the case is that sales of classic books continue to be strong.

Classic books like “Goodnight Moon” and the “Eloise” series still sell steadily, alongside more modern popular titles like the “Fancy Nancy” books and “The Three Little Dassies” by Jan Brett, but even some best-selling authors are feeling the pinch. Jon Scieszka, who wrote “Robot Zot,” said his royalty checks had been shrinking, especially in the last year.

In other words, classic books that have stood the test of time and new books that have proven to be good are still selling well. But new books that are a flash in the pan or are just plain bad aren’t selling. Frankly, I think it’s a reflection of the whole book industry: People are starting to be choosy about the books they spend their money and fewer dollars are being spent on poorly written, edited, and produced titles that have filled the seasonal catalogs of publishers for years. The book industry, like the music industry, has gotten by for decades vomiting forth formulaic products hewing to the latest fads and sopping up disposable cash. But in the midst of the Great Recession and an era of easy access to competitive content online, people are less willing to spend money on dreck.

When I look at the children’s books that are out there—much of it the equivalent of junk food, some of it actively harmful to their development—I understand why parents are getting fed up. How many Winnie-the-Pooh equivalent books are produced in a generation? How many Seuss-quality writers have there ever been? Jan Brett is certainly top-notch, and we really like Otis by Loren Long. I’m having a hard thinking of another new picture book that stands out.

As usual, the old media producers of content miss the change in those who purchase and use their content. Music companies blame piracy for declining sales of music rather than their ongoing attempts to make us buy the same classic music catalog over and over again in every new format and then push the likes of Kesha and her doppelgängers at us. Likewise, Hollywood which rarely stumbles upon unique gems like “Lost” and then decides that if we like one “Lost”, we’ll love a dozen poorly made lookalikes. And then if we want to watch the TV shows and movies on something other than the decades-old technology they allow, they accuse us of piracy. And then also blame declining profits on piracy and anything else other than their own shortsightedness.

And thus with the book publishers. I don’t doubt there are plenty of parents pushing their kids into chapter books as part of their ongoing obsession with measuring their own worth by their children’s material success in life, but I won’t overlook the nagging suspicion that much of the blame can be found by looking in their own mirrors.

Two Gmail accounts on an iPhone: incorrect password

I encountered this problem while helping my sister-in-law Theresa set up here new iPhone 4. She has two Gmail accounts and while she could set up the first account just fine, when she tried to set up the second account, she kept getting the message: “Password is incorrect.” But the password was not incorrect. After she spent quite a bit of time pulling her hair out over this, I gave it a try. I tried setting it up as an Exchange account and a few other things, but kept coming back to the same issue. Finally I searched in Google for two gmail accounts on iphone “incorrect password” and came up with this solution, which was intended for a slightly different problem but applied nonetheless:

What the problem is that [sic] the password you enter in IS correct – but what u don’t see and why it says it is wrong IS because you also have to see a captcha (but the problem is, you don’t see it). But if you click here: https://www.google.com/accounts/DisplayUnlockCaptcha And it will unlock all the captchas for ALL your google accounts.

If the muddled grammar threw you, what he’s saying is that when you try to login using two different Gmail accounts at the same time, Google wants to make sure you’re not some nefarious robot and wants to verify you are you. Thus, if you were in a web browser, you would be presented with a captcha (the distorted word-picture that’s intended to prove you’re a human being and not a computer). But since you’re in the iPhone’s settings control panel, no such captcha can appear and it throws an unhelpful error at you. So if you go to that web page, logging in using the problematic Gmail account username and password, and enter the captcha correctly, you will unlock the captcha and it will stop giving you an error on your iPhone.

Hope that helps with your problem, if you came here with the same one. Keep in mind this solution was working as of September 12, 2010. No guarantees that future iPhone system updates and/or Google system changes won’t change all this.