For Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, the timing of his public appearance at the D8 conference could not have been better. Last week, Apple surpassed Microsoft to become the world's most valuable technology company. A little more than a decade ago, Apple was struggling for its life, and many tech pundits were predicting its demise.
So Mr. Jobs's wide-ranging interview with conference hosts Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher began, appropriately, with a softball question: How did it feel to stand at the top of the technology heap.
"For those of us who have been in the industry a long it is surreal," Mr. Jobs said. "But it doesn't matter very much. It is not what's important. It is not why any of our customers buy our products. I think it is good for us to keep that in mind. But it is a little surreal."
Mr. Jobs then hit on all the news that has surrounded Apple recently -- the stolen iPhone prototype, the war over Flash with Adobe, the suicides at Chinese contract manufacturer Foxconn, AT&T's network problems, the rivalry with Google and more. He didn't make any news or announce any new products or partners, but he delivered some interesting tidbits. Perhaps most significantly, he said Apple has no plans to get rid of Google's search and maps services on the iPhone or iPad.
"We have some Google properties on our phone," Mr. Jobs said. "Just because we are competing with somebody doesn't mean you have to be rude."
Mr. Jobs also appeared to pour cold water on reports that Apple was about to unveil a new version of Apple TV, saying that the digital television business was plagued with a series of problems, including challenges in distributing new products. "That's why when we said Apple TV is a hobby, that's why we used that phrase," he said.
Mr. Jobs was far more circumspect when he was asked whether there might soon be an iPhone running on a network other than AT&T's in the United States. Mr. Jobs bit his lip as we appeared to think how to answer. "There might be," he said. After he was pressed about when that might happen, he added: "The future is long. I can't talk about that stuff." Speculation has been building that Apple may soon unveil a phone running on Verizon Wireless.
Mr. Jobs said he didn't set out to have a war with Adobe over the Flash, the Web technology that Apple has refused to include on the iPhone on and iPad. And he said that the success of Apple's products suggests that consumers are doing fine without it.
"We didn't start off to have a war with Flash," he said. Mr. Jobs said Apple simply made a technical decision not to invest in a technology that the company believes will decline as others, like HTML5, will rise to replace it. "It wasn't until we shipped the iPad that Adobe started to raise a stink about it. We didn't raise a stink about it." he said."We weren't trying to have a fight. We just decided not to use one of their products in our platform."
When pressed on whether the absence of Flash was bad for consumers, he answered that consumers appeared to have spoken with their wallets. "If the market tells us we are making the wrong choices, we listen to the market." Mr. Jobs said Apple has made a technological bet that flash is not necessary, and that customers, in essence, pay Apple to make such choices and deliver good products. "If we succeed, they'll buy them, and if we don't, they won't," he said. "People seem to be liking the iPad. We sold one every 3 seconds since we launched them."
Mr. Jobs also predicted that the ongoing shift in technology away from the PC and toward mobile devices will continue. But rather than disappear, the PC will become a niche product, he said. Mr. Jobs compared the role of the PC, the workhorse of computing for the past three decades, to the truck, when America was primarily an agrarian nation. "All cars were trucks because that what you needed on the farm," he said. Now trucks are one in 25 to 30 vehicles sold, he said. "PCs are going to be like trucks. They will still be around." He then added: "This transformation is going to make some people uneasy."
Mr. Jobs said that he believed the iPad would offer new opportunities for content creators, and especially for news organizations, to charge readers for their products. He advised media companies to price products low, just like Apple did with songs on iTunes. "As one of the largest sellers of content on the Internet today, Apple's lesson is price it aggressively and go for volume," he said. "I believe people are willing to pay content. I believe it in music. I believe it in media. And I believe in it in news content."
Mr. Jobs said he was concerned about the rash of suicides as Foxconn, but said the factory was not a "sweatshop" and noted that Apple is "over there trying to understand what is happening." And he said that he believes that a lot of the problems with making calls on AT&T's network with the iPhone will be resolved before the end of summer.
Mr. Jobs, who is still gaunt, was not asked about his health problems and did not discuss them. But in the only allusion to them, he said. "The last few years have reminded me that life is fragile."
Article appeared on ndtv.
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