Answers From Steve Jobs at Apple's Shareholder Meeting

DECS writes "At today's Apple annual shareholder meeting, a series of proposals were presented for voting after which CEO Steve Jobs answered a series of questions from the audience. Jobs talked about Greenpeace, stock options, the iPhone, Mac OS X Leopard, and .Mac."

'prompting Jobs to pull an iPhone out of his front

[larry bagina]

If he pulled it out of his front pocket (Jobs wears jeans), perhaps it's not prone to scratching or easily breakable. Maybe they learned something.

Re:'prompting Jobs to pull an iPhone out of his fr

[Propagandhi]

Or maybe he has a thrown of iPhones in his office, and doesn't care if he scratches one at a shareholders meeting...

Re:Anyone notice a change in Jobs?

[catdevnull]

Dude--he made $646.6 MILLION dollars last year [com.com] *AND* he probably won't be paying any of it back or going to jail for that back-dating thing [npr.org].

He's walking on sunshine.

Re:Green Mfg

[hardburn]

Great idea. Hold up Dell and HP for what they plan to do, while villifying Apple for already doing those things years ago.

The environment is an incredibly important issue that doesn't deserve the nitwits at Greenpeace.

"iPhone out in June"

[vertigoCiel]

He says it'll be released on time, but he said the same thing about the Apple TV a few weeks before they announced it would be delayed.

Re:Anyone notice a change in Jobs?

[neoform]

Erm.. he's been a billionaire for a long time.. do you really think another 600mil is gonna make him walk on sunshine?

Re:/. has been

[ktappe]

The reality is that Apple and Google are the companies making the innovative, neat new products these days that we're having fun playing with. You can either accept that and have fun with the rest of us or be grumpy and effectively yell "hey you kids, get out of my yard!" I feel sorry for you if you continue to choose the latter course of action.

Re:Anyone notice a change in Jobs?

[Short Circuit]

Knowing the whole story now it really does look like

Uh, you've heard his side of the story. What other side have you heard, that you might reasonably claim to heard the whole thing?

It's not that I don't like Jobs and Apple; I'd love to get me some of that pearly fruit, if I had the money. It's just that I don't take what individual people say as the whole story.

roughlydrafted.com article == blog entry?

[vic-traill]

I'm not an OS X guy, so I don't follow or know my Mac-related sites. Anyway I follow the link, and I'm reading along, and in the second Greenpeace-related paragraph I encounter:

encouraging user donations to Greenpeace to somehow solve that issue.

My BullshitDetectorReadingOpinion(submission) returns a mild buzz. Next line:

After attempting to take credit for Apple's announcements (referring to the G.P. rep)

sends me off on a bit of surfing of roughlydrafted.com, and googling of same said, which leads me to the conclusion that roughlydrafted.com is Daniel Eran's pulpit. Some of the 'articles' are fine and interesting, but that's not my point.

A few weeks back someone defined the difference between digg and /. as that the former is a blog aggregator+comments and the latter is a news aggregator+comments.This captures the difference for me, and makes me wonder about the submission a bit.

I suppose this is why we have arguments on /. as to whether bloggers are journalists http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/ 07/0428225 [slashdot.org].

I do admit that Mr. Eran is pretty up-front with his bias, so you know where he stands while you're reading him.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:roughlydrafted.com article == blog entry?

[base2_celtic]

Eran is in a tough position. He has a fervent dislike of biased journalism. He also has a known interest in (and love of) many Apple products. This makes it difficult for him to write on these topics, and still appear detatched.

He's passionate, certainly. Angry at some Microsoft shills? Obviously. Biased? No, I don't think so. The reason I think that way is because of the way he puts his influences and beliefs up front. He doesn't hide them. He doesn't pretend they exist. He references constantly, and provides reasoned arguments to back up any claims he makes.

He's not right all the time, but he's right a whole lot more (for my money) than almost any other person writing about Apple today. I trust what he has to say because of the way he says it, and the evidence he brings to bear. I also trust him because of his track record of making big predictions that get proved right.

Disclaimer: I use and prefer Mac OS X as an operating system, and write OS X games.

Re:do something with the cash!

[Paradise Pete]

do something please! Any fool can put money in the bank. At least convert it to Euros or something, the dollar is getting weaker!

What do you think, that they just toss it into a checking account? When a company has "cash" that doesn't mean there are bags of money laying around. Of course it gets invested. And they make a lot of money doing so.

And your statement about "at least convert it to Euros" is naive. If you really think you can predict currency exchange rates, believe me, you'll be able to afford a lot more than 1,000 shares of AAPL. Currency trading is the biggest market in the world. If you can predict it well you'll have all the money you could ever spend.

Re:Jobs on his salary:

[Anonymous Coward]

'I make fifty cents just for showing up, and the other 50 cents is based on my performance.'

He's a marketing genius, no doubt about that. He is the highest paid executive in the US [computerworlduk.com], and still manages to get focus on his 1$ salary PR stunt.

Re:Greenpeace

[aquila78]

I think there is a definite need for the Greenpeace campaign. I think what we really need to address the environmental issues concerning chemical waste and recycling policies, is informed choices. That means that the information comes from a trusted an unbiased source. Greenpeace undermines it position as such by running an uninformed campaign. That's sad, cause Greenpeace are one of the only entities which can pull a campaign with some impact of. I think greenpeace should take Job's advice: Hire experts and get the facts right. This way their campaign will have a lot more impact. Even though the Apple affair was a bit of a FUD-filled the need for the campaign is still there. They have got peoples attention, I hope they will use that attention constructively. Besides pressuring PC manufacturers I think that Greenpeace should push for legislation [slashdot.org].

Re:forget about being "slightly better"

[beelsebob]

As for Apple, I wish they'd replace their styrofoam packaging with something recycled and biodegradable. Apple's packaging is like a throwback to the 70's. Yes and no... I agree, I'd rather see recycled cardboard cartons, but what they use is certainly not a throwback to the 70s... The boxes are only just big enough to fit the item into, and the styrofoam they use usually has large holes cut in it to reduce consumption and weight. Bob

Re:We Love You Steve!

[gnasher719]

'' on the environment - no need announce environmental goals as other computer manufacturers are doing because iJobs himself thinks that doing so accomplishes nothing. ''

And that is so obviously correct, I don't know why you mention it at all.

Reducing waste helps. Announcing a goal to reduce waste doesn't help.

What is better in your opinion: Removing PVC from packaging (Apple twelve years ago) or announcing the goal to remove PVC from packaging in the next two years (HP) ? I know what's better in my opinion, and unfortunately we also know what is better according to Greenpeace.

Missing the Innovation

[LKM]

Innovative? Uh, let's see - (...) iPhone - not really fair since it isn't out yet, but from what we've heard ... Edge, limited to 4 or 8 GB required storage, touch screen only, mediocre camera. Innovative - not at all (see HTC, Samsung, etc).

You're obviously utterly missing what's innovative about Apple's stuff. It's not that they have the latest and greatest tech (they often do, but it's not important). The innovative stuff is how they design the user interaction.

You can get pretty phones from LG. They do more and cost less than the iPhone. The problem is that the UI sucks.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Green Mfg

[hardburn]

I agree with the other reply to this post--Greenpeace is worse than nothing. Their raving lunacy makes the oil industry look like the sensible ones. There are ways to promote environmental issues in a calm, reasonable manner, but this has been made nearly impossible, because you'll just get lumped in with Greenpeace.

As for "it's of course easy to sit on your ass and comment on /. about how stupid Greenpeace is", you don't know me or the projects I've researched and undertaken along these lines.

Re:Green Mfg

[porcupine8]

I put Greenpeace in the same category as PeTA - pushing their respective movements backwards, because they make everyone think that anyone who cares about the environment (or animals) is as batshit insane as they are. Spending more money on publicity for their crackpot campaigns than on actually helping anyone. Preaching to their little mostly-teenaged choir, not noticing that the masses are backing away slowly, not only from them but from other legitimate groups that just happen to share a few surface features but actually do a lot of good.

Re:forget about being "slightly better"

[That's Unpossible!]

How does it reduce consumption to cut a large hole into something which was already produced?

Let's see, what's more likely... produce large, solid block of styrofoam on assembly line, run it through another line to cut all the holes in it.

OR

Create the styrofoam in special molds so "the holes" are there from the beginning.

Jesus I can't believe this has to be explained

Re:Anyone notice a change in Jobs?

[tm2b]

Everybody else is focusing on his compensation, but I think it's a lot more - at his level of wealth, money is more an abstract way of keeping score than anything tangible. It's not like you can live in two homes, eat two meals, or sleep in two beds at once.

Instead, consider this. For decades, he's had to live with the internal certainty that he was right, that computers should be designed according to his philosophy, but that that dastardly Bill Gates stole the ideas that Jobs brought to market and proceeded to dominate the computing market. Meanwhile politics at Apple pushed him out, making him sit on the sidelines building NeXT. Years ran into decades of watching somebody who he thought committed the highest crime of having no taste eat the lunch that he believed should have been his.

Now, finally, he's on top of the world. He's brought his vision to the world of portable music, and the world has smiled and said that it is good - and that Microsoft's attempts to enter that market are, well, not so good. The innovative animation studio he nurtured through a vision of the highest quality instead of quantity, has been given the highest compliment possible (in being purchased at a very high price) by Disney, the keepers of the legacy of the oringal wave of animation innovation. On top of that, he's poised to bring that vision to an even larger market.

Love him or hate him, but he's got every reason in the world to be happy. Money's nice, but bringing your vision to fruition and having it succeed, and having the world sit up and take notice - that's priceless. And I think that there's every indication that this is what really drives the man.

Usability is not subjective

[LKM]

I hope you're not working in any position where you design user interfaces - although I guess that, unfortunately, many people who do design UIs think like you do. You're wrong, of course. Usability is not subjective. It's measurable.

I'm not entirely sure you actually mean to say that usability is subjective. You're right when you say that different interfaces make different use cases simple. And yes, there will be cases where other phones are easier to use than the iPhone. But given Apple's track record, I expect the iPhone to be one of the - if not the - easiest to use phones on average.