A very interesting retrospective look at a Rooling Stones interview Steve Jobs gave back in 2003 regarding the future of digital music and Apple’s role in that industry, only eight months after having opened the iTunes Music Store:
The metrics on what portion of Apple’s revenue consists of iPhone sales versus Mac sales (39% to 30%) were very interesting.
I also really thought Jobs’s comments on copyright was spot on: how maintaining intellectual property rights is not only important for the economy and the future of innovation, but that it when it becomes so easy to steal, not having an equally easy legal alternative leads to the corrosion of consumers’ character.
A collection of very well written articles looking back at the early days of Macintosh and the significance of Apple (through their first heyday, their almost-demise, and their resurgence) over the past 25 years.
Great video with slick monotone vector-based animation providing a fairly comprehensive history of the Internet infrastructure:
I’ve always loved understanding the history of staple institutions that have had a huge impact on the present but which we currently take for granted. Back in 1999, I read a couple of books about the development of the personal computer industry. Accidental Empires was my favourite because it touched on the seminal works of so many influential companies (Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Xerox PARC), although Apple Confidential was a little saucier.
I love reading about old microchips and processor speeds and the release of products (or even advertising) that revolutionised the word; the humble beginnings that begat monumental ahievement. Looking back with hindsight, we think of those early contemporaries and the feats the took on, the journeys on which they would embark. I chuckle smugly, thinking, if those folks only knew what they were starting. But then again, I think that they must have. I don’t believe it was really all that accidental.
Any kind of “Early Days” retrospective I find interesting. This short video is no exception. It’s extremely well produced and thorough in its facts. The only problem with it is where it stopped. It ended with the existence of the infrastructure, but there are so many other stories that can be told: details on how the Internet was first used by academic institutions, bulletin board systems, and then later pay services; then the rise of ISPs, and then the web; the introduction of companies like Netscape, Yahoo, Google, the dot-com boom; and then the subsequent true usefulness of all this technology culminating into a social phenomenon, the world connected–Wikipedia, YouTube, social networking, etc.
There’s so much to this story, and I can only imagine how informative and engaging it would be if presented by this visual story teller. Well done.