The man who should replace Steve Jobs at Apple

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

Whether Steve Jobs really does only need to get his hormones back in balance, or there’s something more serious going on, Apple are going to need to find a new top dog at some juncture.

For me, there’s one outstanding candidate for the job and (whisper it) he comes from the old enemy: Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky.

Sinofsky’s performed not one, but two minor miracles at Microsoft. He was the man responsible for the magnificent overhaul of the Office suite, with Office 2007. Microsoft was so scared of tampering with the Office cash cow that the software had barely changed in appearance since the days of Windows 3.1. Redesigning the interface on a piece of software that is used by the vast majority of office and homes around the world was fraught with risk, but Sinofsky and his team pulled it off with care and no small amount of style. Now not only is it immeasurably easier to produce professional-looking documents in Word, for example, but fast-gaining open-source rivals such as OpenOffice now look tired by comparison.

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Ballmer vs Jobs

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008

I went to see Steve Ballmer speak in London yesterday. For anybody who’s not had the pleasure, here’s a few simple steps to aid you in recreating the experience. Pick up your chair, pop it in the car and drive to the airport, then sit yourself behind the engine of a Boeing 747 and wait for takeoff. When it blasts you through air traffic control, you’ve pretty much had the experience of Steve Ballmer in full flow.

 He’s a force of nature. He stalks the stage like some slightly crazed but bizarrely literate bear stalking the bars of its cage. He barks his way through his speech, stops, heads off on tangents, U-turns, growls, snarls and flicks insults at rivals with the lethal precision of a ninja throwing shurikens. Take this from yesterday…

“Google has great search, but not much else. They don’t have much for enterprise, collaboration, email … They’re trying, but they’re not there yet.”

 When he bounded onto stage yesterday, he began speaking at a volume that caused every squirrel in a fifteen mile radius to immediately drop out of its tree dead. People in the audience were frozen in shock, as if a whale had just arrived on stage in a bowler hat and started singing showtunes. And halfway through this carnage, it dawned on me. I was being entertained. Contrary to popular perception, Ballmer is a charasmatic man, who is very quick and very funny. 

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The perfect Jobs’ keynote

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

Steve Jobs is clearly not a football fan (at least not the variety of football where you predominantly use your feet, rather than your hands). If he was, he wouldn’t have spent two hours of Monday night tediously trawling through demo after demo of mind-numbing iPhone apps before arriving at “the money shot” of the iPhone 3G itself, thus single-handedly depriving me of the chance to watch the game of the Euros so far, Holland vs Italy.

What really gets up my nostrils is that it was all so unnecessary, as proven by this video, which beautifully condenses the entire two-hour Jobs’ yawn fest into 60 seconds.

Next time I’m watching the keynote, rather than the football, highlights.

Playing Pong, Hollywood style

Monday, June 9th, 2008

This is Nolan Bushnell, unassuming computer science student of the 1960s. With his corduroy trousers and his delightful stripy sweater, he certainly doesn’t look like typical Hollywood fodder.

But after growing up watching, and then repairing, the old midway arcade machines in the theme parks of his native Utah, this man would quickly go on to found Atari, give the world the long-enduring Pong, and eventually end up heralded as one of Newsweek’s “50 Men Who Changed America”.

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