One of the key aspects of Apple – Jobs always made sure you know the names

Gartenberg: If you think Apple is all about Steve Jobs, you have forgotten something
[Via MacDailyNews]

“Conventional wisdom dictates that Apple and Steve Jobs are one inseparable and inexorably tied entity and Apple’s success over the last decade can only be attributed to the symbiotic combination of the two,” Michael Gartenberg writes for Macworld.

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Can you name anyone besides Steve Ballmer at Microsoft? Not many could.

But lots of people knew about Tim Cook, Phil Schiller, Jonathan Ive.

Many people know who developed the original Mac. Not only are many names known, but there are Wikipedia links for many of them. Check out the history of Windows and you will not see the name of a single member of the creative team.

Jobs is a tough taskmaster but he always made sure that the talent around him was recognized. Not many other CEOs every did as much.

What every modern company should be doing

My wonderful experience with Apple today
[Via MacDailyNews]

I spoke with a senior technical advisor and he didn’t want me to…

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The comments are full of lots of instances of Apple going beyond the expected. Helps explain why its customer service is so highl rated.

Year after year.

Partly why it has such a rapid user base. People are so often treated poorly.

When HP had a heart

Jobs and HP
[Via danielmiessler.com]

When he was in eighth grade, Steve Jobs decided to build a frequency counter for a school project and needed parts. Someone suggested that he call Bill Hewlett. Finding a William Hewlett in the telephone book, the 12-year-old Jobs called and asked, “Is this the Bill Hewlett of Hewlett-Packard?” “Yes,” said Bill. Jobs made his request. Bill spent some time talking to him about his project. Several days later, Jobs went to HP and picked up a bag full of parts that Bill had put together for him. Subsequently, Jobs landed a summer job at HP. He later went on to co-found Apple Computer.

Think of how amazing this is.  The founder and CEO of one of the major companies of the time, Bill Hewlett, got on the phone with a random 12-year-old he had never heard of.  He then proceeded to personally make sure to assemble the bag of HP parts the kid needed.

via blog.eladgil.com

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Hard to imagine HP doing anything similar. I’m not sure any of the recent CEOs would know what a frequency counter was. Of course they all have unlisted phone numbers, I imagine.

I wonder if this is why Jobs continued to receive and answer personal emails from users? It certainly is a great way to maintain a connection with the customer.

Very nice in depth article about global warming

The American ‘allergy’ to global warming: Why?

[Via The Seattle Times]

Tucked between treatises on algae and prehistoric turquoise beads, the study on page 460 of a long-ago issue of the U.S. journal Science drew little attention.

“I don’t think there were any newspaper articles about it or anything like that,” the author recalls.

But the headline on the 1975 report was bold: “Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” And this article that coined the term may have marked the last time a mention of “global warming” didn’t set off an instant outcry of angry denial.

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Over 35 years ago, Wally Broecker’s article coined the word global warming. Using primitive computers – the most powerful supercomputer of the day was about as powerful as an iPad 2 – Broecker made some initial suppositions about temperature changes based on the level of knowledge at the time.

History over the last 35 years have shown his predictions to be amazingly accurate. His model showed that CO2 production by humans would begin to overwhelm the effects of other natural processes. Here is a figure of his prediciton and real data since 1975 (from SkepticalScience):

Not too bad a difference between real data and an idealized curve based on some necessarily  inexact numbers. We have much more exact numbers today and more complicated models than he had but they simply simply add details to the overall effect.

Nothing that has been discovered in the last 35 years has disproven his paper. In fact, a much wider body of knowledge covering many more disciplines exists today than he had access to. All of them support his model.

Arrhenius discussed heating of the globe by human produced carbon dioxide over 100 years ago. Frank Capra produced an educational film on the subject in the mid-1950s. Broecker provided not only the model but accurate predictions 35 years ago. That model has been refined but not overturned by intense research since.

I think I’ll stick with 110 years of scientific research rather than corporate sponsored media campaigns.

Arctic Sea Ice melt

Nice animation from NASA based on satellite measurements. This was the second lowest sea ice extent and the smallest sea ice volume on record. Just look how open the Northweat and Northern passages are.