JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Next, Hari Sreenivasan has our book conversation. He talked with an author who has written about the impact one man has had on the success or failure of a company.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): When the one man is Steve Jobs, it’s a question well worth asking. It’s been a little more than two years since the founder and creative force behind Apple died at age 56.
Since then, former Wall Street Journal technology reporter Yukari Kane interviewed more than 200 people inside and outside the company. The upshot is her book, “Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs.”
SPENCER MICHELS (Newshour): That's lured more companies into the lucrative business of using digital maps, because there's money to be made. Until September, almost all those phone maps were supplied by Google.
But when Apple introduced the new iPhone 5, it replaced Google Maps with its own and learned quickly that mapmaking is fraught with peril.
Immediately, users complained they got lost. Some landmarks were out of place, directions were misleading. Apple CEO Tim Cook apologized, but, still, satirists had a field day with the misdirections.
The stakes in the mapping game are high for Apple and others, since a lot of advertising revenue depends on knowing the location of the phone and promoting something nearby, a restaurant or a hotel, to the user.
Carolina Milanesi, an analyst for Gartner, a technology research firm, says Apple wants to capitalize on that.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): And speaking of tech companies, we turn to a business story about rising to the top and staying there, as Apple reaches new heights and Facebook explores new lows.
Wall Street's closing bell yesterday rang in a new all-time high stock price for Apple. It closed trading at $665.15 per share. That eye-popping figure, thanks to all of those iPods, iPads and iPhones, made Apple the highest valued public company ever, at least in non-inflation-adjusted terms, worth $623.5 billion.
That's 50 percent more than ExxonMobil, the second largest company, nearly two-and-a-half times rival Microsoft, almost three times Google's value and six times that of Amazon. The stock dropped back into nearer-Earth orbit today, closing under $660 per share, as investors took profits.
Meanwhile, it's been a much different story for Facebook and other companies that are part of the social media boom. Just three months after the company's initial public offering had Wall Street salivating...
SPENCER MICHELS (Newshour): The mournful sound of bagpipes drifted through Silicon Valley and at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. Flags flew at half-staff and flowers and a makeshift memorial appeared on a bench, as Apple workers around the world mourned the loss of their longtime visionary leader, Steve Jobs.
LEE JOO-YOUNG, Apple employee, Korea (through translator): I don't personally know him, but I feel like our hero is gone now. I feel heartbroken.
SPENCER MICHELS: Indeed, tributes poured in from all around the globe to the man who left his mark with a variety of landmark innovations.
From Apple users in San Francisco:
WOMAN: It's an amazing legacy. He has just had -- been a force of nature. It's no longer, do you have a portable music device or do you have a Walkman? It's, I want an iPad or an iPod. That's the music device of choice.
SPENCER MICHELS: To world leaders like Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard.
JULIA GILLARD, Australian prime minister: And the jobs of the future are going to be shaped by innovation, and we hear the news of the loss of an incredible global innovator. I mean, it's not too much to say he literally changed our world.
SPENCER MICHELS: Practically the moment Steve Jobs' death was announced, people started showing up at Apple stores around the country, leaving gifts and writing Steve Jobs notes.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): And more now from three prominent voices in the world of technology. Vint Cerf is recognized as one of the founders of the Internet, based on his work as an engineer in the 1970s and later. He now promotes the adoption and use of the Internet around the world as the so-called chief evangelist for Google.
Steve Case is co-founder and former chairman and CEO of AOL. He's now an entrepreneur and backs startups in a range of industries and chairman of the Case Foundation. And Xeni Jardin is editor of the popular technology and culture website BoingBoing.net.
Over the last few months, a steady stream of visitors to Palo Alto, Calif., called an old friend’s home number and asked if he was well enough to entertain visitors, perhaps for the last time.
In February, Steven P. Jobs had learned that, after years of fighting cancer, his time was becoming shorter. He quietly told a few acquaintances, and they, in turn, whispered to others. And so a pilgrimage began.
The calls trickled in at first. Just a few, then dozens, and in recent weeks, a nearly endless stream of people who wanted a few moments to say goodbye, according to people close to Mr. Jobs. Most were intercepted by his wife, Laurene. She would apologetically explain that he was too tired to receive many visitors. In his final weeks, he became so weak that it was hard for him to walk up the stairs of his own home anymore, she confided to one caller.
Some asked if they might try again tomorrow.
Sorry, she replied. He had only so much energy for farewells. The man who valued his privacy almost as much as his ability to leave his mark on the world had decided whom he most needed to see before he left.
Mr. Jobs spent his final weeks — as he had spent most of his life — in tight control of his choices. He invited a close friend, the physician Dean Ornish, a preventive health advocate, to join him for sushi at one of his favorite restaurants, Jin Sho in Palo Alto. He said goodbye to longtime colleagues including the venture capitalist John Doerr, the Apple board member Bill Campbell and the Disney chief executive Robert A. Iger. He offered Apple’s executives advice on unveiling the iPhone 4S, which occurred on Tuesday. He spoke to his biographer, Walter Isaacson. He started a new drug regime, and told some friends that there was reason for hope.
But, mostly, he spent time with his wife and children — who will now oversee a fortune of at least $6.5 billion, and, in addition to their grief, take on responsibility for tending to the legacy of someone who was as much a symbol as a man.
“Steve made choices,” Dr. Ornish said. “I once asked him if he was glad that he had kids, and he said, ‘It’s 10,000 times better than anything I’ve ever done.’ ”
“But for Steve, it was all about living life on his own terms and not wasting a moment with things he didn’t think were important. He was aware that his time on earth was limited. He wanted control of what he did with the choices that were left.”
In his final months, Mr. Jobs’s home — a large and comfortable but relatively modest brick house in a residential neighborhood — was surrounded by security guards. His driveway’s gate was flanked by two black S.U.V.’s.
On Thursday, as online eulogies multiplied and the walls of Apple stores in Taiwan, New York, Shanghai and Frankfurt were papered with hand-drawn cards, the S.U.V.’s were removed and the sidewalk at his home became a garland of bouquets, candles and a pile of apples, each with one bite carefully removed.
STEVE JOBS was an enemy of nostalgia. He believed that the future required sacrifice and boldness. He bet on new technologies to fill gaps even when the way was unclear.
He often told the press that he was as proud of the devices Apple killed — in the parlance of Silicon Valley, he was a master of “knifing the baby,” which more squeamish innovators cannot do because they fall in love with their creations — as the ones it released. One of the keys to Apple’s success under his leadership was his ability to see technology with an unsentimental eye and keen scalpel, ready to cut loose whatever might not be essential. This editorial mien was Mr. Jobs’s greatest gift — he created a sense of style in computing because he could edit.
It would be fascinating to know what Mr. Jobs would make of the outpouring of grief flooding the developed world after his death on Wednesday. While it’s certain he’d be flattered, his hawk-eyed nature might assert itself: this is a man who once called an engineer at Google over the weekend because the shade of yellow in the second “O” was not precisely correct. This is a man who responded to e-mails sent by strangers with shocking regularity for the world’s most famous C.E.O. His impatience with fools was legendary, and the amount of hagiography now being ladled onto his life with abandon would undoubtedly set his teeth on edge.
Many of Silicon Valley’s leaders regularly ask themselves “What would Steve do?” in an almost religious fashion when facing challenges, and it is a worthy mental exercise for confronting the fact of his death. I think Mr. Jobs would coldly and clearly assess his life and provide unvarnished criticism of its contents. He’d have no problem acknowledging that he was a genius — as he was gifted with an enormously healthy ego — but he would also state with salty language exactly where he had fallen short, and what might be needed to refine his design with the benefit of hindsight.
RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): It was all a far cry from the days when Steve Jobs and co-founder Steve Wozniak began building their now ubiquitous brand, from scratch, in a California garage. They scored an early hit with the Apple II, the first consumer-grade computer to catch on. By the mid-1980s, the company was in a slump, and Jobs was forced out.
But he returned in 1996, and Apple began a turnaround. Still, in a rare interview in 2007, he said his work was never about creating the next big thing.
STEVE JOBS: We don't worry about stuff like that. We just try to build products that we think are really wonderful and that people might want. And sometimes we're right, and sometimes we're wrong.
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RAY SUAREZ: Walt Mossberg, whether it's consumer electronics, entertainment, even computing, which is where it all started, this has been a big impact player, hasn't it?
WALTER MOSSBERG, The Wall Street Journal: Well, you know, Ray, I think Steve Jobs is a historic figure.
He's not only a historic figure in business, but really in America. He has not only disrupted and innovated in computers and consumer electronics for all those products we saw just now listed, but he has, in the process, shaken up and revolutionized the music industry, the movie industry, publishing industry. Even the retail industry, the Apple store chain that he built, is widely admired.
And on the side, while he was doing all that, he bought a little company called Pixar and turned it into the most successful studio in Hollywood and revolutionized animation.
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WALTER MOSSBERG: But the devotion to product is -- goes beyond just those words. It's really a devotion to designing products for actual users. You know, a lot of computer companies -- Hewlett-Packard is a good example in what they are doing in spinning off P.C.s -- are really much more interested in selling to businesses, selling to intermediaries, like I.T. departments.
Steve Jobs calls those orifices. He's much more interested in designing something for the actual consumer, whether they're in a big company or just a family. And that -- and he's a perfectionist about it. And he's surrounded himself with other people who are just laser-focused on that.
The other thing, Ray, I think is incredibly important is, they don't just make little innovations based on market research. They take big risks and make big bets on what they think the next thing that people will want is, even if the people don't know it themselves at the time.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
*Anti-First Amendment policies that attempt to turn America into a theocracy by enshrining ANY religious belief as law.
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