Apple Names New Chairman 114
angry tapir writes "Arthur Levinson, former CEO of biotech company Genentech, is taking on the chairmanship of Apple's board, filling the role that Apple founder Steve Jobs vacated when he died last month."
El Reg notes that Disney CEO/President Robert Iger was also appointed to the board, and that this marks the first time since the return of Steve Jobs to Apple that the CEO and board chairman were different people.
please (Score:5, Funny)
please let him be some jacked roid raging hairy chested mans man. every time i look at an apple product i felt like watching the view and eating some ice cream
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thou hast nailed it my good man! (/. 99.9 gender assumption)
Will the reality distortion field last? (Score:5, Insightful)
These are pretty conventional corporate appointments, which leads me to wonder how much longer the Steve Job's aura will last. I think they would have been better off appointing a very charismatic figurehead as CEO (as the *public* face), and then letting the business folks quietly run the show behind the scenes. It's hard to believe that fans will one day cry like their daddy died when Tim Cook or one of these corporate insiders leaves. And Apple has always relied on a certain degree of devotion from their fans (I'll resist the cult comparison) and an image of hipness.
Re:Will the reality distortion field last? (Score:5, Insightful)
These are pretty conventional corporate appointments, which leads me to wonder how much longer the Steve Job's aura will last. I think they would have been better off appointing a very charismatic figurehead as CEO (as the *public* face), and then letting the business folks quietly run the show behind the scenes. It's hard to believe that fans will one day cry like their daddy died when Tim Cook or one of these corporate insiders leaves. And Apple has always relied on a certain degree of devotion from their fans (I'll resist the cult comparison) and an image of hipness.
The vast majority of iPod/iPhone/iPad owners have never met Steve Jobs; they've never watched an Apple video stream of a Steve Jobs keynote. They may have seen him on the cover of Time once, but they never read the article, because that's boring business-stock-market-computer-geek stuff. They haven't even read the tell-all biography that every tech news site has been posting exposes on, because, well, nobody reads books anymore.
The Steve Jobs posse came out in force on the Internet when Steve Jobs died, but they're a tiny, tiny majority of Apple buyers in real life. Apple has been so successful because it appealed to regular people. The Apple fanboys were just the highly visible cheering section; the stands were filled with regular people.
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The fanboys are who buy the inital offering and sell the concept to their friends.
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[...] but they're a tiny, tiny majority of Apple buyers in real life
You clearly don't have a facebook or twitter account
Twitter accounts (Score:2)
You clearly don't have a facebook or twitter account
Of course I don't. All the twitter accounts [slashdot.org] kept praising GNU/Linux and slamming "M$". I bet twitter would have the same sentiment against Apple if he were still running his sockpuppet show on Slashdot today.
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On the day of his death, something like 80% of my (non tech-savvy) friends changed their profiles to something apple related and updated their statuses in praise of Steve Jobs. Very few of these friends own apple products, may I add, so this wasn't even remotely related to an 'apple fan' thing.
So what I meant by the facebook comment, is that I observed exactly the opposite than what you think, in practice. The media and the world in general reacted very vividly to Steve-Jobs' death, apple-fans or not. The m
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Did you forget where Apple was before Jobs came back?
The haters claimed there was a RDF at Apple even before he came back. That's how much they are under the real RDF.
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Any group of fans who refer to 'the others' as 'the haters' is a fucking cult.
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Any group of fans who refer to 'the others' as 'the haters' is a fucking cult.
See Sig.
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Any group of fans who refer to 'the others' as 'the haters' is a fucking cult.
See Sig.
Look at your behind, much more insightful.
Re:Will the reality distortion field last? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Additionally the unconditional fans are what can save a business when it hits a rought patch. Harley-Davidson resembles Apple in this respect.
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Additionally the unconditional fans are what can save a business when it hits a rought patch. Harley-Davidson resembles Apple in this respect.
So we're destined to have Apple-themed pickup trucks, bicycles and dildos?
We're doomed.
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So we're destined to have Apple-themed pickup trucks, bicycles and dildos?
We're doomed.
Nope. That would mean Apple offering a wide range of options on their hardware... :D
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Just be thankful you won't be getting Apple-themed "truck nuts."
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It's also magnified by the fact that the wider press don't understand technology so they'll take their cues from whoever happens to be the IT flavour of the day because it's easier to steal their ideas than to do genuine research. That means it only needs a few key figures sporting trendy gadgets for them to sink into the wider public consciousness.
Agreed, although I don't think it's a problem that's necessarily limited to just the wider press, as I've seen a lot of IT trade publications going more and more downhill in the past decade or so.
Honestly though, I think that's more tied into the long slow death of expertise based management which has resulted in more and more businesses hiring people with absolutely no technical aptitude for Engineering and IT positions who make purchasing decisions based on trends and buzzwords, not on technical merit an
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Steve Jobs' followers don't need to be huge in number to make a big difference, if they're the type of people who set trends. Stephen Colbert is always sporting the latest iGadget on the Colbert Report,.... So if the people who follow Steve Jobs are the people the rest of us take our social cues from, the Reality Distortion Field can have a huge effect.
Interestingly enough, those "biggest fans" are also the ones making fun of Apple products to a huge public - something those who are actually under the RDF can't realize: the Haters. Unless of course they want to show how everybody thinks Apple sucks: then they point to those "Fanboys" as support.
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Jobs learned from the really big cult creators of the 70's. He explicitly studied under one of them. Thus we find ourselves today confronting a cult that refers to anybody who is opposed to said cult, particularly those who say: "my fucking god, look at that emporer over there with no clothing on!" as 'The Haters.'
Anybody who has known a moonie in real life knows that there is a long painful deprogramming process involved in getting them their fucking clue. So the fanboys are probably beyond hope for th
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Jobs learned from the really big cult creators of the 70's.
Says the guy blindly following his own leaderless cult. Apple is evil! Lockstep, everybody!
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but they're a tiny, tiny majority of Apple buyers in real life.
I thought Apple had a huge number of people who buy their products. If that is the case, how can the majority of them be "tiny, tiny"?
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but they're a tiny, tiny majority of Apple buyers in real life.
I thought Apple had a huge number of people who buy their products. If that is the case, how can the majority of them be "tiny, tiny"?
No, you've taken that quote out of context. It was referring to "the Apple posse" being a small number. Most of Apple's customers are not die-hard fans, just regular people who want to stay hip with the latest phone or technology fashion.
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Re:Will the reality distortion field last? (Score:4, Insightful)
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That's some real spin there. Obviously people like Macs because they have captured a decent share of the desktop computer market, but it is not correct to find niche gr
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"Fringe vocal minorities" could be at least as accurately used to describe FOSS zealots.
This is true, and is not a rebuttal of the post you replied to.
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There in lies the problem.
Keeping the rabid fanboys deluded is easy, its the average people who will first realise that Apple isn't all it's cracked up to be. No one really knew Steve Jobs, they only knew of Steve Jobs.
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Most of us remember the direction the company took the last time Jobs was no longer heading it up.
Hey, I liked my Beige G3 Minitower. And the Newton had a bright future. If Jobs hadn't come along and trashed the company when he did, they might have merged with Sun and we might have a hell of a good desktop, plus robust tablets ten years ago.
It's impossible to predict alternative history, but it's also a mistake to assume history went the way it is hyped as having gone.
Jobs had a history of walking into th
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I think they would have been better off appointing a very charismatic figurehead as CEO (as the *public* face), and then letting the business folks quietly run the show behind the scenes.
I hear Jerry Sandusky might be looking for work.
/too soon?
Re:Will the reality distortion field last? (Score:4, Funny)
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Tim Cook is an interesting person, and having him step up made sense.
Levinson??? Now that's strange.
Iger? Jobs respected him. The guy understands content and polish. But he doesn't understand cultivating the cult.
Cultivating...
That describes Apple in one word!
LOL
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Levinson??? Now that's strange.
No YOU don't understand. Levinson - CEO of Genetech. The biotech company so old that they managed to scarf gene.com. Remember, Jobs had his DNA sequenced.
Sequenced DNA + Genetech = Jurassic Park IV or a new Steve Jobs.
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To be fair, Jobs was probably trying to get definitive truth of who his birth father was.
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You don't have to do what he did - sequence his entire [time.com] genome if all you want it do determine paternity [wikipedia.org]. At least in the normal sense of paternity.
If he wanted to see where he branched off the evolutionary tree from Homo sapiens, well, then it's a reasonable approach.
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I stand corrected! Thank you.
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These are pretty conventional corporate appointments,
Fool! He's head of Genetech [gene.com]. The first Biotech company. They're so old they managed to get "gene.com".
Think cloning.
Think Steve.
Think how much DNA of his is floating around in the lab.
Profit!
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Fools! Didn't they see The Boys From Brazil [wikipedia.org]?!?!?
In comes all the scumbags (Score:3, Insightful)
Maximizing profits to boost short term share price will be the #1 focus of the company going forward.
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That doesn't mean you would want to maximize short term profits. In fact it would mean the exact opposite. If money is worth less and less everyday then you want to spend now.
Spending more now means smaller short term profits in expectation of higher future returns when the prices of all the things you spent the money on now are higher. Either you'll be able to offload those things at the now higher prices or have a competitive edge against those companies who have to buy that stuff as the higher prices.
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I made no such assumption. I was responding to the faulty "inflation" -> "pursue short term profit" logic, not corporate management practices.
Lack of customer focus? (Score:5, Interesting)
So, the biotech place only sells R+D to megacorps and their customer experience is designed for PHDs in ChemEng, Chem, Bio, MDs, and of course, beancounters.
The Disney guy thinks he should own our culture in perpetuity and the government should enforce and extend failing business models, admittedly a widely held belief.
Who, if anyone in their leadership, cares about the general public actually buying their stuff?
I could see this resulting in a big push for "ItunesU", or tablet/phone electronic medical records, or maybe an even more draconian DRM setup. Any way this team could benefit the general public?
The best I can come up with is something like a real world highly integrated "medical tricoder" that is DRM locked down so you/your doc/your med insurance has to pay apple each time they want to look at your records, forever. Also the tricoder only works with Apple-approved MRI units, Apple-approved IV pumps, etc.
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Just because the guy has a biosciences R&D background DOES NOT in any way mean that's all he's got in the toolkit. Just because a man has a hammer doesn't mean he's gonna try and hammer you out some milk, innit?
I'd focus instead on the fact that the guy's climbed the corporate ladder, has a keen business sense, and from his degree I get that he has no problem understanding analyzing and manipulating complex systems. Apple's a complex evolving system "at the intersection of technology and the humanities," and nothing is more intrinsic or cutting-edge to the humanities than bioscience, in its own weird way.
Whatever, I'm an optimist!
I frankly don't think that selling valium has much to do with selling macs.
no matter how big rdf.
I'm disappointed (Score:4, Funny)
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Disney's animatronics are too unrealistic. Apple would have had to completely reinvent animatronics for iSteve.
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Word Shapes (Score:1)
It's biotech, biotch (Score:2)
Arthur Levinson becomes Chairman of the Board (Score:1)
Where do I sign up for my $50
Could be a good fit (Score:5, Insightful)
Like Apple, Disney is nearly obsesive about protecting it's IP; while ripping off everybody else's IP.
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You mean that fact that every time that Disney movies are about to fall into the public domain, we end up with an extension of copyright times? Does the Disney Act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act) ring a bell?
Basically, Walt Disney is allowed to take the Grimm brothers work, but nobody is allowed to do the same to Walt Disney (until 2019 -- which is when the time will be extended again).
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Basically, Walt Disney is allowed to take the Grimm brothers work, b
Their work? They collected tales from the Public Domain, many of them from France.
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Their work? They collected tales from the Public Domain, many of them from France.
Yes, and their collection of stories remained essentially public domain. They didn't try to lock-it-down after they put it in their collection. That's a big difference.
Does this new guy heading Apple mean we are going to have people here defending Fucking Disney on slashdot now? It might be time to split off apple.slashdot.org from the main page.
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Their work? They collected tales from the Public Domain, many of them from France.
Yes, and their collection of stories remained essentially public domain.
As does Snowwhite. Are you Grumpy? Or Whiney?
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Which are you? Chip or Dale?
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And as long as people like you continue to validate that lie, by using oxymorons like "intellectual property", as long will the organized crime continue their protection racket.
Don't you people realize that you're supporting and validating that way of thinking when you use it.
First time? (Score:5, Informative)
this marks the first time since the return of Steve Jobs to Apple that the CEO and board chairman were different people.
What U see is What U get... (Score:3)
...you are witness to the fact AAPL is all grown-up, its founding father passed on. This is what a mature, responsible and somber AAPL stewards its legacy.
After the shock, transition and adjustment to losing its visionary leader fades, you can expect Apple to find its vision, voice and vocation going forward. Not now
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It's hard to imagine a mature Apple. They've already tried to go without their visionary creators, it wasn't a very nice experience.
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I know, I know, Schiller and Amelio and the wasteland that was Copeland and the 90's, full of abortive efforts that never bore fruit at Apple. On the other hand, the environment and landscape is totally different now than then.
Apple not only has a straight flush of products in its hand, it also has a stacked deck.
Hell, with their market cap, they're on their way to owning the goddamned casino.
From some one who knows Art (Score:5, Interesting)
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I don't understand all the Art bashing here.
The haters need a reason why Apple will finally fall - like they have been predicting since 1976.
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Again with 'the haters.' Don't you have flowers you should be selling at an Airport somewhere?
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Again with 'the haters.' Don't you have flowers you should be selling at an Airport somewhere?
The hateboi doth protest too much...
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To be fair, Apple did almost fail several times, since 1976, and probalby would have if Jobs had not come back.
John Sculley, Anyone? (Score:2)
I recall what happened to Apple last time an outsider became a high-level executive. Damn near killed the company. Remains to be seen how this will all play out, but I think we'll see more commodification of Apple's various lines, pruning out stuff seen as not productive (computers, for example), and a slow decline in "wow" factor as the Jobs gang loses more control and leave the company. The goal will be to maximize the bottom line in whatever way possible, killing off the gold-egg-laying goose. Withou
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Steve was ousted from the company the last time, rather than spending years plans and ideas and clueing in his successor(s) on where to go when he wasn't around anymore. Completely different scenarios. Besides, Tim's got long haul options on the line.
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You apparently don't understand the term "non-executive chairman".
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Art Levinstein has been on the board for years, working with Jobs to do what he did. He was a personal friend of Jobs, and gave medical advice (which was ignored).
This is NOT a Sculley redux.
Total power vacuum. (Score:1)
Often after a strong leader disappears the vacuum afterwards usually ends up in a huge power struggle from all the underlings. All the pent up motives and needs surfaces at once all over the place.
Unless the new leader is exceptionally strong and good at suppression i expect a huge power struggle at Apple where much good talent will be tossed as sharkfood. Its not unusual that power struggles like these almost destroys otherwise very healthy companies.
Apple wasn't evil (Score:3)
Emm Oh You Ess Eeeeeee! (Score:2)
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It's too bad Wayne and Girth got old because that was a funny movie.
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America now has a Sony Corp. Apple is now toast.
Watch for corporate-driven FAIL to be the new order-of-the-day for Apple, once a proud, independent standout from the pack.
Curse app stores and iPhones, if you will. Two years from now, when it's the other way 'round, you'll look back and marvel that Apple made AT&T dance.
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