Steve Job’s describing the future – from 1997

Steve Jobs’s Closing Keynote at WWDC 1997
[Via Daring Fireball]

I linked to this off-handedly the other day, to source Jobs’s “Focus is saying no” quote, but the whole thing — a Q&A session with WWDC attendees — is extraordinary. The video is poor quality but the content is utterly compelling.

It was post-NeXT acquisition so Jobs was back at Apple, but only as an advisor, not yet as CEO. But the man clearly had a vision then for what Apple could be. And we now know he was right. He was unbelievably right. And then he made it happen.

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This is pretty amazing to relive. Check in at about 15 minutes. Steve essentially describes his vision for the cloud – access to all personal files from any device through a network.

How rapidly the world has changed in 15 years.

And how much Steve Jobs has changed also.

UPDATED:New business evil – repurchasing vested options to screw employees

Report: Skype and investor Silver Lake screwed employees out of stock options
[Via Boing Boing]

Skype and Silver Lake, a large investor, recently fired a bunch of senior executives, allegedly to prevent their stock gaining real value in a forthcoming acquisition by Microsoft. Digging into the contracts’ legalese reveals an obfuscated clause that decodes to something like “we can buy your stock back at the grant price, even if it has vested, prior to any sale of the company.” Felix Salmon at Wired:

I no longer think that what Skype did here is pretty evil: I now think it’s downright evil, and destroys the balance of trust on which Silicon Valley has been built. What’s more, I simply don’t believe that Skype did all of this itself, without detailed input from Silver Lake. … I don’t know where they got these techniques from, but they’re very alien to Silicon Valley and indeed the rest of the business world. And they do no good at all for the reputation of private equity companies more generally.

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What happens is that an employee is given options to buy a certain number of shares at a set price. It takes several years for all the shares to become vested and available to the optionee.

When the company gets bought out, usually at a price higher than the set option price, the employee gets to share in the pot of money.

Unless you are Skype. They have an agreement that allows them to repurchase all the options at the set price, meaning the employee gets nothing and the company gets all the profit.

All they have to do is fire the employee. Which is what they did. See it is not illegal to fire anyone simply so the investors can make more money.

I imagine that any company trying this sort of thing in the future will have a hard time getting good programmers.In fact, I think some of the real software problems Skype has had recently may be due to the fact that many of the really good programmers saw the problem with this clause and went elsewhere.

The evil that Skype has become seems to fit well with the corporation buying them.

UPDATE: and another evil thing is that the forced sale of these options  creates a taxable event that will require the employee to deal with the IRS about these options. It’ll be interesting to see just what the IRS comes up with.

Why we live in wonderful times

We often complain about technology and the changes it brings. But it is important to remind ourselves of the incredibly rich world that it provides. Here we have an example.

Not that technology created those wonderful voices. Those have been around since humans came out of the trees.

No, it is the fact that we can now listen to those wonderful voices on a computer. The music was recorded on a video camera and edited using tools that cost hundreds of  thousands of dollars just a few years ago. It is presented on an open website for free and we can watch that video over networks that used to only be available to the government.

This technology, which is roiling our very civilization because of the disruptive uses it is being put to, provides us with power that our ancestors would have had in the hands of the Gods.

Like any technology, its uses depends on the types of people who access it. But the use of technology changes us also, making it very hard to know just what we and society will become. The fear this change creates drives the lives of many people.

So, let’s also remember to embrace the aspects of technology that help us to remember what sort of society and people we wish to be.

The sort that can listen to such wonderful voices – that can help support the continuing production of such lovely voices in the coming years – whenever it wants to.

Here is another great clip:

The universe is amazing

by cosmobc

Does it Spoil Anything to Know How the Tricks Are Done?
[Via EvolutionBlog]

Writing in The New York Times, Tim Kreider wonders if the immediate availability of information has robbed us of the romance of not knowing:

Instant accessibility leaves us oddly disappointed, bored, endlessly craving more. I’ve often had the experience of reading a science article that purported to explain some question I’d always wondered about, only to find myself getting distracted as soon as I started reading the explanation. Not long ago the Hubble telescope observed that Pluto’s surface is changing rapidly, and noticeably reddening. It’s not a bland white ball of ice, but the color of rust and soot. We’re not likely to learn anything more until the New Horizons spacecraft gets there in 2015. In the meantime, we just get to wonder.

I find this mysterious and tantalizing. As soon as I began reading possible explanations — ultraviolet light interacting with chemicals, blah blah blah — I started to lose interest. Just knowing that there is an answer is somehow deflating. If some cryptozoologist actually bagged a Yeti and gave it a Latin name, it would just be another animal. An intriguing animal, no doubt, but would it really be any more bizarre or improbable than a giraffe or a giant squid?

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