Peggy Noonan on Steve Jobs and Why Big Companies Die | Hacker News Reader

Peggy Noonan on Steve Jobs and Why Big Companies Die

forbes.com

20 pointsrfreytag13 comments

My interpretation is, that in Apple's case, Steve getting cancer in the mid 2000's appears to have galvanized him, and by extension the entire company.

I just read through all John Siracusa's OS X reviews, and things really moved fairly slowly for the first few years, then from Tiger on, man, stuff just starts to fire on all cylinders. Think about what else was happening at Apple, the iPad (shelved), the iPhone, the move to Intel, Aperture, the unibodies, the MacBook Air.

It's hard to imagine that this peculiar set of circumstances, that put a guy like Steve Jobs along with a huge cast of incredible hardware and software engineers, in one place, then inspired Steve by showing him his own mortality, could ever happen again.

Interesting conjecture, but these things must have been in the pipeline for several years. Plus the great run starts with the iPod in 2001.

Yes, I wouldn't argue that the iPod shows a vision, but the push on OS X, and other things, from 2004 or so onwards feels in a different league, at least to me, compared to around 2000.

Also, look at how slowly OS X improved in the first few releases, and compare that with the way that every single iOS release just hits the ball out of the park. It's like night and day.

Something that makes me somewhat uncomfortable, is the relatively lameness of Lion in comparison to what came before. To a small but noticeable proportion of users, including myself, Snow Leopard is more attractive than Lion, and luckily, it should be supported for a while by virtue of being the last 32-bit intel supporting OS X.

Thank you for prefixing your post with the pundit's name.

Can't disagree with what she's saying. But I'd add that if we're talking about firms whose business is computers, 15 years feels like 75.

Personally, I think it is more harmful that companies keep trying to live when they are becoming obsolete, like the oil industry.

Petroleum products are more of a necessity to people than Facebook, Google, and all their Macs and iDevices put together. The oil industry may be crooked and they may corrupt world politics, but they are anything but obsolete.

For now, but I am particularly thinking of the oil industry trying to prevent alternative energy from becoming popular (I am thinking in particular of electric cars).

I'm thinking of bio diesel. We have the technology, the delivery infrastructure, clean engines, mechanics, the land. And its as carbon neutral as it gets. But no, instead we have all these massively energy intensive processed "biofuels", or electric vehicles using rare-earth elements for batteries (we've hit peak lithium already) and they're still charged using coal.

  > the land

Indeed. The same land we grow food on. Farmers jumping to grow plants for biofuel was one of the reasons driving food prices up.

The price skyrocketed because of some spectacular crop failures, price of oil, etc. Biofuels contributed but do not explain the price changes we saw in 2007-2008 [2]. That is more industry FUD. A further problem is ethanol and corn. Corn is subsidized by the tax payer, so naturally everyone wants to use it for everything, including biofuel. Unfortunately its incredibly inefficient to turn into biofuel [1]. Its actually incredibly inefficient period - but humans don't like to eat palm oil.

So yes you are correct in worrying about biofuels affecting agricultural prices: low yield corn was affected by its use as a biofuel.

This is why I argue for biodiesel from high yield crops that can produce 700 gallons per acre, instead of corn's 17 gallons per acre.

[1] http://www.progressivefuelslimited.com/PDF/PFL-Biodiesel%20C...

[2] http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/2009/967/ifdp967.pdf

Electric cars still pose significant technological challenges. They're expensive, have limited range, take a long time to recharge, rely on rare and expensive elements, and may pose novel safety risks (e.g.: the Volt's delayed-response battery fire collision behavior).

I'd love to see something replace the fossil-fuel internal combustion passenger vehicle. It's going to be a tough solution, and I suspect it'll ultimately be a mix of public transit (vastly higher efficiencies, social and other costs), human-powered vehicles (bikes are great in human-scale cities and small towns), and some form of biofuel-powered vehicle. Simple truth is that liquid hydrocarbon fuels are energy dense, well understood, clean (relatively) and efficient. The problem has been the source we use.

My suspicion is that personal IC vehicles of 20 years from now will use a mix of power sources, and hybrid drives may be common (they offer certain efficiencies), but that a liquid hydrocarbon fuel source will be a large part of that mix. The difference is that we'll be growing rather than drilling or mining that fuel, at least to a large extent.

Oil companies get us by cheap oil price. Expensive oil price incentivize alternative energy since they are more able to compete with oil.

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