The next Steve Jobs will totally be a chick, because girls are No. 2--and No. 2 always wins in America. Apple was a No. 2 company for years, and Apple embodies a lot of what have been defined as feminine traits: an emphasis on intuitive design, intellect, a strong sense of creativity, and that striving to always make the greatest version of something. Traditionally, men are more like Microsoft, where they'll just make a fake version of what that chick made, then beat the shit out of her and try to intimidate everybody into using their product.



Louis CK is the George Carlin of our generation. Well, not in the same league yet but he has one of the most profound and biting standup routines amongst his peers. One of his acts, he elaborated on the usage of words like 'nigger' and 'faggot' and not one black or homosexual person was offended. If you haven't seen or heard him yet and if you have a taste for slightly edgy comedy, you must.

This post originally appeared in Tim O'Reilly's Google+ feed.

This tweet by Steve Case (@stevecase) struck home for me, because in the aftermath of Steve Jobs' death I've been thinking a lot about O'Reilly, wanting to make sure that we streamline and focus on the stuff that matters most.

Here's the money quote from the article Case mentioned:

"My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products," Jobs told [biographer Walter] Isaacson. "[T]he products, not the profits, were the motivation. [John] Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It's a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything."

Jobs went on to describe the legacy he hoped he would leave behind, "a company that will still stand for something a generation or two from now."

"That's what Walt Disney did," said Jobs, "and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That's what I want Apple to be."

All of our greatest work at O'Reilly has been driven by passion and idealism. That includes our early forays into publishing, when we were a documentation consulting company to pay the bills but wrote documentation on the side for programs we used that didn't have any good manuals. It was those manuals, on topics that no existing tech publisher thought were important, that turned us into a tech publisher "who came out of nowhere."

In the early days of the web, we were so excited about it that Dale Dougherty wanted to create an online magazine to celebrate the people behind it. That morphed into GNN, the Global Network Navigator, the web's first portal and first commercial ad-supported site.

In the mid-'90s, realizing that no one was talking about the programs that were behind all our most successful books, I brought together a collection of free software leaders (many of whom had never met each other) to brainstorm a common story. That story redefined free software as open source, and the world hasn't been the same since. It also led to a new business for O'Reilly, as we launched our conference business to help bring visibility to these projects, which had no company marketing behind them.

Thinking deeply about open source and the internet got me thinking big ideas about the Internet as operating system, and the shift of influence from software to network effects in data as the key to future applications. I was following people who at the time seemed "crazy" — but they were just living in a future that hadn't arrived for the rest of the world yet. It was around this time that I formulated our company mission of "changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators."

In 2003, in the dark days after the dotcom bust, our company goal for the year was to reignite enthusiasm in the computer business. Two outcomes of that effort did just that: Sara Winge's creation of Foo Camp spawned a worldwide, grassroots movement of self-organizing "unconferences," and our Web 2.0 Conference told a big story about where the Internet was going and what distinguished the companies that survived the dotcom bust from those that preceded it.

In 2005, seeing the passion that was driving garage inventors to a new kind of hardware innovation, Dale once again wanted to launch a magazine to celebrate the passionate people behind the movement. This time, it was "Make:", and a year later, we launched Maker Faire as a companion event. Around 150,000 people attended Maker Faires last year, and the next generation of startups is emerging from the ferment of the movement that Dale named.

Meanwhile, through those dark years after the dotcom bust, we also did a lot of publishing just to keep the company afloat. (With a small data science team at O'Reilly, we built a set of analytical tools that helped us understand the untapped opportunities in computer book publishing. We realized that we were playing in only about 2/5 of the market; moving into other areas that we had never been drawn to helped pay the bills, but never sparked the kind of creativity as the areas that we'd found by following our passion.)

It was at this time that I formulated an image that I've used many times since: profit in a business is like gas in a car. You don't want to run out of gas, but neither do you want to think that your road trip is a tour of gas stations.

When I think about the great persistence of Steve Jobs, there's a lesson for all of us in it.

What's so great about the Apple story is that Steve ended up making enormous amounts of money without making it a primary goal of the company. (Ditto Larry and Sergey at Google.) Contrast that with the folks who brought us the 2008 financial crisis, who were focused only on making money for themselves, while taking advantage of others in the process.

Making money through true value creation driven by the desire to make great things that last, and make the world a better place — that's the heart of what is best in capitalism. (See also the wonderful HBR blog post, "Steve Jobs and the Purpose of the Corporation." I also got a lot of perspective on this topic from Leander Kahney's book, "Inside Steve's Brain.")

See comments and join the conversation about this topic at Google+.

Related:

Work on Stuff that Matters: First Principles
The State of the Internet Operating System
State of the Internet Operating System Part Two: Handicapping the Internet Platform Wars
What is Web 2.0?

It's well-known that Steve Jobs put off surgery to treat his pancreatic cancer for nine months after it was diagnosed in 2003. Instead, he attempted to treat it with alternative therapies before electing to have a Whipple procedure in 2004. Now his biographer Walter Isaacson tells CBS show 60 Minutes that Apple's iconic CEO regretted not having the surgery earlier:

"I've asked [Jobs why he didn't get an operation then] and he said, "I didn't want my body to be opened...I didn't want to be violated in that way," Isaacson recalls. So he waited nine months, while his wife and others urged him to do it, before getting the operation, reveals Isaacson. Asked by Kroft how such an intelligent man could make such a seemingly stupid decision, Isaacson replies, "I think that he kind of felt that if you ignore something, if you don't want something to exist, you can have magical thinking...we talked about this a lot," he tells Kroft. "He wanted to talk about it, how he regretted it....I think he felt he should have been operated on sooner."

Isaacson also reveals that Jobs continued to receive treatment for the cancer while maintaining he had been cured of the condition to Apple employees.

The 60 Minutes interview with Isaacson will air Sunday, October 23 at 7pm EDT. Isaacson's book, Steve Jobs will hit store shelves on Monday, October 24, and the Ars review of the book will be up shortly thereafter, so keep an eye out for it.





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But the culture of Foster and Partners (as it was then called) was different from firms in Silicon Valley with one notable exception - Apple, the place that combined geek business inventiveness without its reputation for poor aesthetic sensibility. Perfecting the model of selling design that is compatible with big business, Foster simultaneously grew one of the largest architecture practices in the world while still winning awards for design excellence. The secret was to design buildings like the limited edition, invite only Porsches that Foster drove and fellow Porsche drivers would commission them.

More alike than you would imagine.

"I contribute ideas, sure. Why would I be there if I didn't?"

"Jobs shared some interesting observations and anecdotes about Apple, his relationship with customers and of course the iPhone 4 debacle. When looking over my notes I saw some nuggets of wisdom which I feel are universal, regardless of how you may feel about Apple, Jobs and the company’s response to the iPhone 4 debacle."

"Then Steve comes in," Evangelist recalls. "He doesn't look at any of our work. He picks up a marker and goes over to the whiteboard. He draws a rectangle. 'Here's the new application,' he says. 'It's got one window. You drag your video into the window. Then you click the button that says burn. That's it. That's what we're going to make.' "

"We were dumbfounded," Evangelist says. This wasn't how product decisions were made at his old company. Indeed, this isn't how products are planned anywhere else in the industry.

Mr. Jobs is indeed starting to behave like that other convicted monopolist we know and love.  Yet unlike the latter, Jobs did not engage in underhanded business practices to create his monopolies. They were handed to him on a silver platter by the rest of the market, which insists on peddling either outright crap [2] or cheap imitations [3] of Apple’s aesthetic.  In order to resist the temptation this worldwide herd of mindless junk-peddlers a

We can sit here in our geeky little dorkosphere arguing about it all day, but as much as Apple clearly enjoys our participation, the people Jobs wants to sell this to don't read our rants.

How the iPad was actually designed. In one night.

What actually will be announced on January 27th.

Interesting how a man can retain his top position in the wildly fluid business world.

On the evidence, he's (Jobs) nothing more than a greedy capitalist who's amassed an obscene fortune. It's shameful. In almost every way, Gates is much more deserving of Jobs' rock star exaltation

Steve Jobs' $US1 salary was dwarfed by $US646 million in stock compensation for 2006, ranking the Apple CEO as the highest-paid executive in the U.S.