I have no problem with the guy, but has anyone noticed that there's a fluff piece about Larry nearly every year around this time?
One observable consequence of this is that Steve Jobs who gave us so much is widely reviled, while Bill Gates who destroyed the packaged software industry, almost killed the internet and went so far as to have schools raided by SWAT to make them buy windows licenses for their computers (computers that were Macs, by the way, back when Macs ran PowerPC and couldn't run windows anyway)... is widely regarded as a humanitarian[1]. Jeff Bezos (whom I've known personally) is widely regarded as a Tech guy (despite being really just a pointy haired boss.)
There's a reason these guys spend money on PR-- the PR becomes the public perception.
[1] I've been in the room when both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos lost their cool (three separate occasions, fortunately I was not the target.) Steve was quietly upset "how are we going to fix this?" and "we're never going to let this happen again, are we?" with all the weight those comments imply. Bezos and Gates both lit into the person with a clear intention to make their victims feel like nothing (both in different ways brought up the victims family as well.) I worked at Amazon and Microsoft, but not Apple.
Hahaha, what? iOS set a huge negative precedence and pretty much killed off any hope for a mainstream phone that wasn't focused on consuming pre-approved content.
That's unfair. Before iOS you typically had to go to your carrier's app store to download anything. Verizon's policies about who gets listed and how much it costs were much worse than iOS.
Palm ultimately failed because the leadership at Palm failed to recognize what they had and simply refused to innovate into the smartphone world until it was far too late. Still they showed that an app marketplace was something peple really wanted. Well before the iOS walled garden.
I remember a few little games and calculators. Never felt compelled to pay for anything.
When I had a palm windows mobile thing circa 2004, that was when I saw the light. As horrible as the platform was, having a browser and google maps on the road was like having superpowers. My wife and I took a 5 week Road trip honeymoon, and basically pricelined our way across the country. Amazing.
Musk is the chief technical specialist in SpaceX, as he put himself. It's unclear what he does on this role, but his explanations are touching some rather deep details, so at least he looks like having a good understanding of technical aspects of SpaceX systems.
At the top you usually have a set of old guys (you might have read Skunk Works, those old guys are Kelly Johnson and Ben Rich in that book) but in this case Musk and likely a few others... a set of people who have to know a little bit about everything and enough to drive the important piece of engineering of the moment towards a successful project.