Steve Jobs: a pirate who commanded the navy
The death of Steve Jobs, announced tonight by Apple, was expected but still comes as a shock. There are very few business people who are truly irreplaceable but Mr Jobs was undoubtedly so.
Like many other people, I heard the news via his products – in my case through Twitter on an iPod Touch — and am writing this on a MacBook Air. Mr Jobs’ original vision of a world of personal computers came truer than even he imagined.
A tablet computer for the price of an iPad case
No question, for me, about the most interesting business story of the week: the launch in India of a $35 tablet computer called the Aakash (“sky” in Hindi). For perspective, go to the tablet department of Walmart.com, where $35 will buy you – just – a snap-on case for an iPad 2.
For anyone in doubt about the political significance of the announcement, Kapil Sibal, India’s education minister, rammed it home:
The rich have access to the digital world; the poor and ordinary have been excluded. Aakash will end that digital divide.
Jeff Bezos of Amazon takes aim at Apple
Since he kept on repeating it, there was no difficulty in working out what Jeff Bezos regarded as the most important aspect of the Kindle Fire launch in New York this morning.
Mr Bezos gave a little smirk as he announced the $199 price of his new competitor to the Apple iPad – and to the entire ecosystem of films, music, magazines and books that can appear on Apple’s device:
“This is unbelievable value. We are building premium products at non-premium prices. We are determined to do that, and we are doing it.”
Some further reasons to beware Groupon’s IPO
The latest developments at Groupon hardly improve my faith in its prospects for a sound initial public offering.
Not only has Margo Georgiadis, its chief operating officer, left after five months (having, according to the FT, “struggled in dealings with Andrew Mason”, its chief executive) but on Friday it adjusted its S1 IPO filing in a way that cut its reported revenues by more than half.
A failure of duty by Hewlett-Packard’s board
The appointment of Meg Whitman today to replace Léo Apotheker at Hewlett-Packard is a resounding blow to Mr Apotheker. But it also reflects very badly on the hapless HP board.
I was very critical of Mr Apotheker’s abrupt change of course in August, arguing that he had “needlessly alienated investors by thrusting so much unpalatable information and future uncertainty on them at once. He should have taken things steadily rather than making a big bang.”
But what was HP’s board doing by appointing him less than a year ago, agreeing to his strategic shift, including a spin-off of its personal computer division, and then turning round and jettisoning him after the market reacted badly?
According to the business textbooks, Reed Hastings is a visionary and innovator. But thousands of his customers, and many of his investors, think the chief executive of Netflix is an idiot.
Netflix and the art of the empty apology
At first glance, the apology by Reed Hastings, chief executive of the US video service Netflix, for raising the base price of his video service by 60 per cent looks sincere and heartfelt – the kind of plain-speaking that is too rare in chief executives.
“I messed up. I owe everyone an explanation.”
So far, so good, but reading further into Mr Hastings’ missive, which follows a 15 per cent fall in Netflix shares last week as it said it expected to lose 1m subscribers as a result, it becomes clear that the apology does not mean he is backing down – in fact, he is going further.
For a man running a small business, Michael Arrington has attracted a lot of attention in the past couple of weeks. By the time he agreed to leave AOL this week, he had stirred up a maelstrom across Silicon Valley and the digital media.
| About this blog | Blog guide |
John Gapper is an associate editor and the chief business commentator of the FT.
He has worked for the FT since 1987, covering labour relations, banking and the media. He is co-author, with Nicholas Denton, of All That Glitters, an account of the collapse of Barings in 1995.
Andrew Hill is an associate editor and the management editor of the FT. He is a former City editor, financial editor, comment and analysis editor, New York bureau chief, foreign news editor and correspondent in Brussels and Milan.
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