Tim Cook
Steve Jobs' medical leave puts the spotlight back on the other members of Apple's executive ranks, in particular Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook, financial chief Peter Oppenheimer, and marketing chief Phil Schiller.
Tim Cook
A one-time Compaq executive, Cook has run much of Apple's operations for some time. He also was the man tapped by the board when Jobs previously went on leave for cancer treatment.
Much of Cook's career has been spent handling manufacturing and procurement duties, although he took over responsibility for sales at Apple, before adding the COO title in 2005. In addition to his work at Compaq, Cook also spent 12 years at IBM, where he ran manufacturing and operations for a large chunk of Big Blue's PC business.
Peter Oppenheimer
A longtime Apple finance guy, Oppenheimer started with Apple in 1996 serving as controller for the Americas and, eventually, as the company's overall controller, before taking over as chief financial officer upon the retirement of Fred Anderson.
Peter Oppenheimer
Prior to Apple, Oppenheimer was a divisional CFO at Automatic Data Processing (ADP).
Phil Schiller
Schiller has long served as Jobs' right-hand man when it comes to pitching Apple products to the public. A frequent guest in Jobs' keynote speeches, Schiller has also given some solo talks, most recently at this year's Macworld.
An avid sports fan, he coached an Apple hockey team that took on a team from Sun Microsystems, among other rivals. In addition to his work at Apple, Schiller served as a VP of product marketing for Macromedia.
While these three will be most visible during Jobs absence, others also play key roles. Design guru Jonathan Ive is known as Apple's strongest creative voice outside of Jobs, while former Target executive Ron Johnson is responsible for Apple's booming network of retail stores.
On the software front, chief software architect, Avie Tevanian, is no longer there, but several other software execs remain, including software engineering head Bertrand Serlet and applications chief, Sina Tamaddon.
Phil Schiller delivered the keynote address at Macworld 2009.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET News)I had to chuckle at Fake Steve Jobs' analysis of the potential of the Microsoft-Yahoo deal.
"The Borg-Yahoo merger won't work," writes Fake Steve (also known as Forbes magazine's Daniel Lyons) in a blog posting. "Here's why. It's like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they'll run faster."
Scroll down to the end and you'll get another hilarious mental picture. "Imagine a circus act in which two enormous, clumsy, awkward elephants that don't really like each other are supposed to mate while riding on skateboards," Lyons writes.
Lyons also offers several graphical depictions of the merger, not all of which are tasteful enough for me to link to, but they are not hard to find on the site, which has a number of other MicroHoo-related posts.
What I wonder is what the real Steve thinks about the merger. Feel free to e-mail me, Steve. You know where to reach me.
Most people compare Bill Gates' keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show and Steve Jobs' Macworld Expo address by analyzing the relative strength of the products announced.
That's all fine and dandy, but what about looking at the words themselves? That's exactly what the ever-resourceful Todd Bishop at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has done. In a blog posting Tuesday, Bishop includes a tag cloud showing the most frequently used words by each, as well as an analysis of the rate of big words used by each.
In terms of which words came up the most, a tag cloud shows words such as "digital," "device," "great," "phone," and "Windows" atop Gates' list, while Jobs most frequently used "great," "iPod," "iPhone," "Mac," and "MacBook."
So both execs think their own products are great. No surprise there.
Gates' speech scored a 9.37 on the Gunning-Fog index, a measure of the number of years of education required to read a particular text. Jobs' address, meanwhile, clocked in at 6.9. Of the words used by Gates, 5.2 were classified as "hard words," while only about 3 percent of Jobs words were given that distinction.
It's up to you whether you think big words are better. I'll stay out of that one, but it's a fun read. Check it out.
While most of Steve Jobs' energy on Tuesday was spent touting the new MacBook Air, the Apple chief did take some time to praise longtime rival Bill Gates, who plans to stop working full-time at Microsoft at the end of June.
"Bill's retiring from Microsoft is a big deal," Jobs told the New York Times. "It's a significant event, and I think he should be honored for the contributions he's made."
I'm guessing Jobs probably won't issue a Bill Gates edition iPod, but the two have been making nice in public, including a rare joint appearance at last year's D: All Things Digital conference.
In the same interview, Jobs also notes that Apple went through 100 design prototypes before coming up with the final MacBook Air design and suggested that Amazon may have trouble selling the Kindle--and not because of the product's design.
"It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don't read anymore," he said. "Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore."
I guess that shoots to heck my prediction that Apple would soon add e-books to the iTunes Store.
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