Category Archives: Directing Business

Directing Business

Missing iPhones

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Some 800,000 to 1 million iPhones had been unlocked by the end of 2007, the sources say. The high end of that range far outpaces most analysts’ assumptions of 750,000 unlocked phones. The vast majority of those phones are trickling into nations around the world where Apple has yet to sign up a local carrier—especially China, say industry sources (BusinessWeek.com, 12/4/07). “In my travels around the world, two out of three iPhones I’ve seen outside of the U.S. have been unlocked,” says Richard Doherty, director at consultant Envisioneering Group. “In China, nine out of 10 phones are hacked.”

More at Businessweek

Directing Business, Marketing, Success Stories

Story behind iPhone

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The demo was not going well.

Again.

It was a late morning in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier, Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple’s top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple’s boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn’t just buggy, it flat-out didn’t work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, “We don’t have a product yet.”

The effect was even more terrifying than one of Jobs’ trademark tantrums. When the Apple chief screamed at his staff, it was scary but familiar. This time, his relative calm was unnerving. “It was one of the few times at Apple when I got a chill,” says someone who was in the meeting.

More at Wired.com: The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry

Leadership, Management

Andy Grove’s last stand

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Andrew Grove, a man who survived the Nazis, the Communists, scarlet fever, prostate cancer and Bill Gates to run what was briefly one of the world’s five most valuable companies, is saddled with a disease that will eventually rob him of control over his body. But before it debilitates him, Grove is going to fight. Over the past eight years Grove has immersed himself in the minutiae of the disease and has used his money and his stature to agitate for more and faster research on the neurology of Parkinson’s. “You can’t go close to this and not get angry,” says Grove. “There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little.”

More at Forbes.com