Steve Jobs: An American Innovator

Steve Jobs resigned from Apple on Wednesday. I have a great deal of admiration for the man. My family's first computer was an old Apple Macintosh. It was small, cute, and different.

I don't really remember it that much, but it was my first exposure to computers. During the time I grew up, Apple was always the underdog. Microsoft and its PC allies seemed to have a dominating presence in the personal computer market.

If you look at Apple now, as the greatest company in the world, you have to wonder how they got to where they were. The answer to everything is Steve Jobs. He's been a visionary, he's been an innovator, he's been The Man.

His resignation has been like a worldwide eulogy:

His departure leaves an empty feeling because he has brought us so much.

The history of Apple of a company is very much intertwined with the life of Steve Jobs at Apple. The New York Times had a chronology of Jobs's career at Apple.

Obviously, one of the key moments for Apple was when Steve Jobs returned to the company after a ten year hiatus:

When Steve returned, Apple just took over the world. Those iMacs were fantastic and cool. I owned a special edition Graphite G3 iMac. I actually still have it in my room, even though I haven't used it in forever. I remember the first thing I did was watch the free "A Bug's Life" DVD that came with the computer, probably related to Steve's ownership of Pixar at the time.

The Wall Street Journal has him pegged:

His story isn't just the story of a person, but the combination of time, place and person, spawning a career in industrial design of awesome proportions. Mr. Jobs founded two pivotal companies in American history. Both happened to be named Apple. One was the Apple of the Macintosh, the other was the Apple of the iPhone.

We'll return to that article in a second, but his return's significance to the company is incomparable. You can see it in the stock price:
Over the last ten years, he has brought us a plethora of technological advancements with iPod and iTunes, the new mac computers and laptops and more recently the iPhone and iPad. These increased the influence of the company by diversifying its products in music as well as mobile devices. The iPod was the first of these new devices that really changed the game:

It throws up endless interesting juxtapositions: just now my iPod came up with Nick Cave, Judy Collins, Kasabian, Elvis Costello, Booker T, the Beatles, PJ Harvey, Arcade Fire and the Carpenters. It’s not perfect (why is it so determined to team Nick Lowe with Led Zeppelin?), but if you don’t like one of its choices you can just press fast-forward. Thanks to shuffle, you can create a radio station of a kind that died out when the broadcasters allowed niche playlisting to become a tyranny. And it doesn’t have any chit-chat or jingles or adverts. The music really is the thing.

Other companies came out with their own devices but the iPod was the iPod and iTunes was iTunes. He made it easy. You could get iTunes on any computer and it was a simple way of keeping track of your music. It linked to the iTunes Store as well as to your iPod when you downloaded new music. It just changed the music listening experience.


Jobs gave business an identity. He brought it to the 21st century:

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work,” Jobs said in a 2005 Stanford University commencement speech, which has been much quoted in recent days. “And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”

Here's the speech if you haven't seen it:
There are two other great Jobs speeches here.

He moved business forward. Technology is what drives innovation today. It is what makes our lives easier. Jobs has made a career of making products that people not only need, but are easy to use. I conceived the idea of the iPhone soon after the iPod, but I don't think I could have executed the product much better than Apple did.

That's been the story of Apple in recent year. I've questioned the need of some of their products, but the products they've brought forth have always been executed flawlessly. And people buy them like crazy. When I sit on the T and look around, everyone is on their iPads doing work or playing games. Apple has become a company that has a presence in every aspect of your life. That's a lot of what has made the company so great.

Going forward, it will be interesting to see how it goes. Jobs himself said that Apple will continue to innovate:

"I believe Apple's brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it," he said in his announcement this week, perhaps his one concession to ordinary sentimentality, for it seems impossible that Apple, or any company, could anticipate another run like Apple's in the 10 years since the iPod's introduction.

Going forward without Jobs is a scary prospect. It is something that is now a reality. Changes will be made:

Rather than acting as mere advisers to one of the world's great visionary leaders, the board may have to take more control, be less deferential to the new CEO Tim Cook than it was to Jobs, and meet more often.

Jobs is going to be the new chairman on a board that lacked a chairman before. This means that while he is no longer the CEO and won't be in charge of day to day operations, he will still have a strong say in the direction of the company. Despite his health worries, it's a good sign.

It's a good sign for everyone, the shareholders, the customers, but most importantly as a sign of Jobs's health. Steve Jobs has contributed so much to the world. He is an inspiring story for any American as a self-made man, as an innovator, an entrepreneur, as a cancer survivor and battler, and as an American. In the years to come, Jobs will be immortalized for his deeds. I have to say, it's been a pleasure to read about all the things he's done for Apple.

While this may be goodbye from running Apple, I hope it's not a goodbye forever.

For now, I want to thank Mr. Jobs.

The Patent War

The tech industry is at an interesting crossroads right now. While many of the largest companies have a plethora of cash at their disposal, rather than spending it on acquisitions, research and development, or stock buy backs, these companies are buying up patents to sure up their standing.

This patent purchases have been happening for some time but Google's recent purchase of Motorola has heightened the patent debate:

The costs of our broken patent system are often abstract, but this month Google put a price tag on the problem: $12.5 billion. That's what Google paid for Motorola's U.S. smartphone business and its 17,000 patents. This is $12.5 billion that one of America's most creative companies will not use to innovate, fund research or hire anyone beside patent lawyers.

Rather than using these patents to develop new products, these companies are using them to sure up their market position against their competitors and to start lawsuits. The war is taking place not in the sleek high tech buildings of Silicon Valley, but in the courtrooms.

The Google deal is the biggest in a line of purchases that has seen the biggest companies look to secure a competitive advantage:

Lacking its own trove of patents to vie with Apple, Microsoft and other companies, Google and its hardware partners were targeted by suits aimed at slowing the adoption of Android smartphones. Adding the 17,000 patents of Motorola Mobility, which has been inventing mobile-phone technology since the industry began, may help Google stanch the onslaught.

Google's Android technology has been under attack, so these purchases sure up their position against Apple and other competitors:

Apple stepped up the patent feud by suing Android manufacturers, claiming Google-powered devices copy the iPhone and iPad. Microsoft has sued Motorola Mobility and Barnes & Noble Inc., whose Nook reader runs Android software.

Already, there's a potential lawsuit from Microsoft:

“We have a responsibility to our employees, customers, partners and shareholders to safeguard our intellectual property,” David Howard, Microsoft’s corporate vice president and deputy general counsel for litigation, said in an e-mail. “Motorola is infringing our patents and we are confident that the ITC will rule in our favor.”

Besides the lawsuits, the purchase of Motorola Mobility puts a price on patents:

"There is clearly an upward sloping trend in patent value and patent value being recognized," said James Malackowski, chief executive of Ocean Tomo, an intellectual property advisory firm which values patent portfolios as part of its services. "As with any trend, it's never perfectly smooth, you see volatility in outlier transactions."

I think this best describes the situation:

"There are three textbook ways to value intellectual property, just as you would real estate -- the income approach, the cost approach, and the market approach," he said.

"If you are looking at an apartment building, the market approach says how much do other apartment buildings sell for? For the cost approach, you would ask what it would cost to build a like unit. The income approach says look at the present value of the rents -- or for patents, the present value of the expected earnings associated with owning the technology."

The question is: should these companies be spending their cash on patents? The answer isn't so simple:

Many venture capitalists and software entrepreneurs have warned that software is fundamentally different from other areas of innovation and that patents should be granted much more rarely than they are today. Software almost always builds on previous work, so patents rarely reflect the kind of original work that patent law is supposed to protect.

Part of the problem is that the law no longer distinguishes between how ideas become products and services differently in different industries. A good contrast to software is how advances are made in the pharmaceutical industry, which is made up of largely independent areas of research.

While these companies do deserve protection for their intellectual property, it is not good for the companies nor the technology sector for these companies to just duel over these patents. The cash that these companies have on their books would be better used for new innovation through R&D and to create new jobs. The posturing of these companies suggests more about patent law than anything else. There needs to be changes:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit is the exclusive forum for patent appeals, created in 1982 to keep the law consistent. But with consistency has come decisions upholding patents so broadly it’s hard to tell exactly what they cover.

The solution would be to have stricter standards:

A more reasonable approach would be stricter approval standards. The U.S. Supreme Court seemed to agree last year when it affirmed the rejection of a proposed business-method patent. The decision comes too late for companies that have shelled out for infringement fights. But it bodes well for those that would rather use patents to promote innovation than squelch it.

You cannot change what has already happened, but you can make the future more clear. The purchases of these patents have been made because of uncertainty over these patent laws. They don't know where they are protected and where they are vulnerable.

These companies can't move forward without ensuring that their present is stable. It is time to reconsider how patent law applies to technology. The US government must make a stronger push to ease these companies' worries and get them back to focusing on innovating the future.

The Forgotten Son: Ron Paul

Ron Paul always seems to not be taken seriously. It's unfortunate. After all, he's the one who said governments should have less influence on people's lives. He campaigned hard on it in 2008. Now, it seems everyone else is capitalizing on his original message. He continues to be forgotten:

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The media's ignoring of Ron Paul hasn't gone unnoticed in the mainstream media either:

By now, pretty much everyone agrees Ron Paul was ignored by the media following his second place finish in the Ames straw poll on Saturday. Whether or not the media blackout was justified due to his less-than-favorable campaign prospects is subject to debate.

So what are Paul's prospects? We can judge some of it by his ability to raise money right? Well, he's cash:

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) raised $1.8 million in 24 hours on Saturday and Sunday, a major online "money bomb" timed to coincide with his 76th birthday. This is the fourth time Paul has raised more than $1 million in a day this campaign cycle, and a signal that he will have the money to compete as long as he wants for the Republican presidential nomination.

Paul is still behind Romney and Perry as far as raising money, but the man is raising more money than Michelle Bachmann at this point. He's not going away. And with all that money, he should not go away quietly.

He's also polling well in New Hampshire:

On the ballot Romney remains in a strong position. He leads all candidates with 36% of the vote. However, Perry, making his first appearance in the NH Journal poll, debuts with a strong 18%. Ron Paul continues to impress despite relatively little media attention with 14%. And Bachmann earns 10%. All other candidates were in single digits.

So despite the lack of media attention, Paul continues to raise money and do well in the polls. You've got to still wonder why no one's considering him a serious contender. Is the media attention the only thing keeping him from being a serious contender.

Yet we see all these other candidates that seemingly have no chance getting media attention. Rick Santorum continues to get attention, despite finishing a distant fourth place. Even Jon Huntsman is getting more attention than Ron Paul. What's the deal with that:

Huntsman is challenging orthodoxies of thought that afflict the GOP alone, and taking positions that reflect the conventional wisdom in the media: evolution is a fact, so is climate change, and the debt ceiling had to be raised. In contrast, Johnson and Paul are challenging orthodoxies of thought that are bi-partisan in nature and implicate much of the political and media establishment.

Even more worrying is the fact that not only is Paul getting outshined in media coverage by his fellow candidates, but also by the potential Presidential candidates.

The Tea Party is using a radio blitz for Sarah Palin. Everyone under the sun are waiting for a Paul Ryan or Chris Christie to throw their hat into the race.

It's unbelievable.

In many ways, by not giving Ron Paul fair time or attention, he is becoming a forgotten man in this race. However, the extent to which people are going to ignore him is ridiculous. Palin, Ryan, and Christie aren't even in the race, and attention should not focus on them until they decide they want to serve our country. Huntsman and Santorum are not campaigning nearly as well as Paul, yet they are both getting the mainstream treatment. Whether you like Ron Paul or not, you should agree his voice should at least be heard. The media blackout on Ron Paul is anti-American.

Let the man have a voice.

The Tea Party Candidate

One of the top challenges for any Republican candidate for President is to win the Tea Party vote.

The Tea Party is a grassroots movement that may or may not be misunderstood. When it first emerged, the protests seemed silly because there seemed to be racially motivated, particularly in the way they tried to convince the public that Barack Obama was born outside the United States:

It's been a very controversial movement:

"Given how much sway the Tea Party has among Republicans in Congress and those seeking the Republican presidential nomination, one might think the Tea Party is redefining mainstream American politics," Campbell and Putnam write. "But in fact the Tea Party is increasingly swimming against the tide of public opinion: among most Americans, even before the furor over the debt limit, its brand was becoming toxic."

In spite of this, it has continued to gain political influence amongst Republican presidential candidates.

Rather than discuss the movement, I would like to address in regards to their Tea Party politics.

Michelle Bachmann has been championing herself as a Tea Party Republican, particularly in highlighting her recent voting record in light of the debt crisis. However, she was burned in Friday's Wall Street Journal for some of her stances:

If Mrs. Bachmann is worried that Mr. Ryan's reforms would not address her concerns, then there are other approaches to choose from. But she has declined to offer or endorse any, expressing only vague support for a small increase in the retirement age and greater means testing—neither of which would make a real dent in Medicare's growth, since neither would reform the grossly inefficient payment system that causes costs to explode throughout the health sector. An asterisk is not enough.

The problem is that while the Tea Party has admirable political goals, its politicians may not have the spine to get things done. Providing concrete policies is an important factor:

A posture of bold fiscal conservatism is simply not compatible with timid evasions on Medicare reform. The combination may be politically convenient, but it is substantively incoherent. And it's not just Mrs. Bachmann who has done this—most of the GOP presidential candidates have as well. Virtually every speech they give is laced with promises to tame our deficit and debt, to scale back the size, scope, reach and cost of government. Yet they have little to say when it comes to fixing the fundamental structure of our health entitlements. They want to will the ends but not the means to those ends. And that just won't do.

You can't shy away from strength. By dodging concrete policies, you're building uncertainty for your campaign. One of the main criticisms of Obama was that he didn't provide concrete policies. I think a 2012 candidate will have to provide a much stronger stance on the issues.

Tea Party activists also have concerns about Rick Perry:

The activists and enthusiasts were much more likely to express doubts about a Perry candidacy. Many were dissatisfied with his time as governor and doubted the authenticity of his conservative credentials.

These are the two "front-runners." I discount Mitt Romney only because I think his religion will be an issue and his spotty record is something that he won't defend. Romney is a smart guy, but he's not charismatic and he's not outspoken. I think he genuinely wants to be President and probably would do a good job if elected. However, he lacks those two traits which are prime on the campaign trail. Oh, and he's definitely not a Tea Party favorite.

Interestingly, the two candidates that would probably most appeal to the Tea Party are not even in the race.

Chris Christie of New Jersey had this to say earlier this year:

And let me tell you what the truth is. What's the truth that no one is talking about-here is the truth that no one is talking about: you're going to have to raise the retirement age for social security. Oh I just said it and I'm still standing here! I did not vaporize into the carpeting and I said it! We have to reform Medicare because it costs too much and it is going to bankrupt us. Once again lightning did not come through the windows and strike me dead. And we have to fix Medicaid because it's not only bankrupting the federal government, it's bankrupting every state government. There you go. If we're not honest about these things, on the state level about pensions and benefits and on the federal level about social security, Medicare, and Medicaid, we are on the path to ruin.

Christie is mulling a run as is Paul Ryan, who brought us the Path to Prosperity:

No one person or party is responsible for the looming crisis. Yet the facts are clear: Since President Obama took office, our problems have gotten worse. Major spending increases have failed to deliver promised jobs. The safety net for the poor is coming apart at the seams. Government health and retirement programs are growing at unsustainable rates. The new health-care law is a fiscal train wreck. And a complex, inefficient tax code is holding back American families and businesses.

Both of these candidates fit the Tea Party agenda so far as cutting government spending and reducing taxes. More importantly, they have a strong record for entitlement reform. They have a strong stance against it and would provide the spine that the Republicans that the other candidates lack.

While the Bachmanns and the Perrys may have the charisma to appeal to the Tea Party supporters, they lack the record to bring about changes the Tea Party activiists can get behind. There's hope that one of these men will run for the presidency. However, until then, the Tea Party activists will have to settle for less.