Apple's CEO didn't stand a chance against Barack Obama and Ben Bernanke

Jobs' first Time cover. Image: Time Inc.

He may have made the editors' supposed short list, alongside President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, General Stanley McChrystal, Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, a gang of  Somali pirates and a mob of Iranian protesters.

The readers may have given him 86,729 votes, behind only the Iranian protesters and President Obama in the magazine's online poll.

But when managing editor Rick Stengel did his "reveal" on NBC's Today Show Wednesday morning, it was Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke who had been named Time Magazine's 2009 Person of the Year, not Apple's (AAPL) Steve Jobs.

"Extraordinary guy," said Stengel, "influences our lives in all sorts of ways, but not person of the year."

In the end, Jobs wasn't even among the runners-up. (Those honors went to McChrystal and two candidates not on the short list: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and a sweatshop of Chinese workers.)

Anybody who watched Stengel's Today Show teaser two days earlier knew the fix was in. Jobs may have made the short list, but if Stengel had been serious about choosing the Apple guy, he would have worked Jobs into Monday's show. As you can see in the video below the fold, his name never came up.

Image: Time Inc.

Jobs was very nearly Time's 1982 Man of the Year. Michael Moritz, then a reporter in the magazine's San Francisco bureau (and now a partner at Sequoia Capital) wrote the story. But in end the editors made a broader and more surprising choice: They named the computer the Machine of the Year.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

Apple's plans to build a second Cupertino campus got a green light Monday. Here's why.

Three years ago last April, Steve Jobs himself addressed the Cupertino city council to announce his intention to expand Apple's (AAPL) operations in their town.

After telling council members that he had originally thought to build a new campus in another city, he reminded them that Apple was — and still is — the town's largest tax payer.

It was a classic Steve Jobs sales pitch, and when he was through, the town's elected officials actually applauded his performance.

Below the fold: The April 2006 video, via Cult of Mac.

Steve Jobs' next big thing is being retooled, Asian supply-chain sources report

Artist's rendition. Image: Silicon Alley Insider.

Live by the rumor, die by the rumor. Or at least go on life support.

The Apple (AAPL) tablet computer that all Silicon Valley has taken as a given — but no one outside of Cupertino seems to have seen — won't be arriving early next year, as widely rumored, and may not appear until the second half of 2010.

This according to a report Thursday in DigiTimes, a Taipei-based daily newspaper that covers — with uneven results — every hiccup in the Taiwanese and greater Chinese electronics industry. At one point, MacRumors, which trades in Apple gossip itself, stopped citing the paper without heavy disclaimers about its track record (see here.)

Still, the report includes pricing and component details that, if true, could cause Apple's competitors to rethink their own product plans. Among other things, DigiTimes reports that Apple is gearing up to make two models, one with a 10.6 inch LCD screen, another with a far more expensive 9.7-inch organic LED (OLED) panel.

Based on the cost of components, an OLED tablet might sell for as much as $1,200-1,500, according to DigiTimes, although the price point could be reduced if subsidized by, say, AT&T (T) or Verizon (VZ). DigiTimes' sources expect the 10.6-inch model to priced in the $800-1,000 range.

You can read the full report here. Take it all with a grain of salt.

UPDATE: Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster, one of several analysts who had predicted an early 2010 launch, issued his take on the DigiTimes report in a quick note to clients Thursday morning:

"Bottom line. At this point we cannot confirm or deny the validity
of this report, but believe the exact timing is irrelevant given
Street models do not currently reflect the tablet, expectations
for actual units in 2010 are low, and investors focus is more on
whether the tablet is real and less on timing.

"For purposes of sensitivity, assuming the tablet comes out on
September 1, we believe Apple would sell around 650,000 units at a
$600 ASP in CY10 and would equate to an increase of about 1% to
revenue."

Apple shares closed at $200.51, down 5.45 points (2.65%) for the day.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

How Apple's imperious, brilliant CEO transformed American business.

It's Steve's world, we just live in it.

How's this for a gripping corporate story line: Youthful founder gets booted from his company in the 1980s, returns in the 1990s, and in the following decade survives two brushes with death, one securities-law scandal, an also-ran product lineup, and his own often unpleasant demeanor to become the dominant personality in four distinct industries, a billionaire many times over, and CEO of the most valuable company in Silicon Valley.

Sound too far-fetched to be true? Perhaps. Yet it happens to be the real-life story of Steve Jobs and his outsize impact on everything he touches.

The past decade in business belongs to Jobs. What makes that simple statement even more remarkable is that barely a year ago it seemed likely that any review of his accomplishments would be valedictory. But by deeds and accounts, Jobs is back. Read the rest of the story here.

Runners-up include Gates, Buffett, Page, Brin, Winfrey, Stewart and — wait for it –  Madoff

Photo: Time Inc.

Steve Jobs is the CEO of the decade, according to the new issue of Fortune magazine.

"Jobs is back," writes Adam Lashinsky in the cover story published Thursday. "It's as if his signature 'one more thing' line now applies to him as well. After a six-month leave of absence in the early part of this year, during which he received a liver transplant, he is once again commanding a 34,000-strong corporate army that is as powerful, awe-inspiring, creative, secretive, bullying, arrogant — and yes, profitable — as at any time since he and his chum Steve Wozniak founded Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) in 1976."

The piece includes the revelation that Jobs twice considered taking Apple private, once in a leveraged buyout with Silver Lake Partners and once a few years earlier with financing lined up by his old friend Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle (ORCL).

Sure to stir controversy is Fortune's provocative list of also rans, which includes, along with some obvious contenders (Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, for example), two convicted felons: Martha Stewart and Bernie Madoff.

CNNMoney.com (which carries this blog) has put together an elaborate online editorial package that includes excerpts from Lashinsky's story, a video of him explaining the choice, praises of Jobs from the rich and famous, celebrities' favorite iPhones apps, an interactive timeline, rarely seen photographs and more. The entry point is here.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

Meet the creative director who named a generation of Apple products

Photo: Apple

The TBWA\Chiat\Day creative team was horrified in 1998 when Steve Jobs pulled back a cloth and revealed the bulbous teardrop that came to be known as the Bondi-Blue iMac.

But then Jobs wasn't so crazy at first about the name they proposed for it.

No one had ever seen anything like the new computer, veteran creative director Ken Segall tells Cult of Mac's Leander Kahney in an exclusive interview published Tuesday evening.

"We were pretty shocked but we couldn’t be frank," Segall recalls. "We were guarded. We were being polite, but we were really thinking, 'Jesus, do they know what they are doing?' It was so radical."

Segall eventually came up with "iMac," a name that connected the original 1984 Macintosh with the rapidly expanding Internet. But Jobs took some convincing.

Below the fold, excerpts from the story as Kahney tells it:

Photo: Ken Segall

Jobs said he was betting the company on the machine and so it needed a great name. He suggested one at the meeting, Segall says, but it was terrible. It would “curdle your blood.” …

Segall says he came back with five names. Four were ringers, sacrificial lambs for the name he loved — iMac. “It referenced the Mac, and the “i” meant internet,” Segall says. “But it also meant individual, imaginative and all the other things it came to stand for.” It “i” prefix could also be applied to whatever other internet products Apple was working on.

Jobs rejected them all, including iMac.

“He didn’t like iMac when he saw it,” Segall says. “I personally liked it, so I went back again with three or four new names, but I said we still like ‘iMac.”

He said: ‘I don’t hate it this week, but I still don’t like it.’”

Segall didn’t hear any more about the name from Jobs personally, but friends told him that Jobs was silk-screening the name on prototypes of the new computer. He was testing it out to see if it looked good.

“He rejected it twice but then it just appeared on the machine,” Segall says, laughing. “He never formally accepted it.” …

Segall is delighted that iMac grew on Jobs. “It’s a cool thing. You don’t get to name too many products, and not ones that become so successful. It’s really great. I’m really delighted. It became the nomenclature for so many other products. Millions of people see that work.”

Segall says over the last few years, the debate about dropping the “i” prefix has come up several times at Apple. “They’ve asked: ‘Should the company drop the “i”?’ But there’s a desire to keep it consistent: iMac, iPod, iPhone. It’s not as clean as it should be, but it works.”

You can read more of the interview, including the story of how the "Think Different" campaign got started, at Cult of Mac here.

Also worth visiting: Segall's own blog, Observatory, with his commentary on everything from Motorola's (MOT) Cliq ads (he loves them) to Research in Motion's (RIMM) appropriation of The Beatles' All You Need Is Love (hates it; "they’ve successfully broken the gall barrier.").

Kahney, the former news editor of Wired.com, is the author of several books about Apple (AAPL), including most recently Inside Steve's Brain.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

And now, for a musical interlude: David Pogue — Emmy-winning tech columnist, "Missing Manual" millionaire and Broadway composer manqué — belting out an Evita parody at the Boston Book Festival Saturday, with Apple's (AAPL) Steve Jobs cast in the role of the Argentinian temptress.

Thanks to Mashable's Pete Cashmore for the pointer.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

The trouble with being number one in any industry is that you have nowhere to move but down. Few companies know this better than Nokia (NOK), the Finnish telecommunications giant that has dominated cell phones for so long that in some parts of the globe the brand itself has become synonymous with the device.

Nokia has long excelled at making beautiful phones, but in today’s competitive smartphone market, beauty is just a start. The devices that make consumers salivate are the ones that have great software, offer the most games and social networking features, get great service, and come attached to fast networks. Oh, and they have to be cheap.

One company has shaped this new competitive environment, and it’s not Nokia—nor was it even a telecommunications company until 2007 when it debuted the iPhone.

Apple (AAPL) is eating Nokia’s lunch.

With the iPhone, Apple created a consumer lust for smartphones by showing us we could browse the web from our palms and enjoy it. It launched a device so perfect in form that it has become the gold standard by which all other devices are measured. And it moved the global hub of telecommunications innovation from Asia, where form factors had previously trumped all else, to Silicon Valley, where software makers now race each other to come up with the coolest applications.

None of this has been good for Nokia, which had already lost substantial ground in the North American cell phone market (see “Nokia’s North America Problem”). Their struggle for market dominance in the age of the iPhone has been less about nailing an innovation strategy than playing a hardcore game of block and tackle.  Enter the latest move: on October 22, Nokia filed suit against Apple in a Delaware federal court claiming infringement on 10 patents it holds on the integration of several technologies at the heart of Apple’s iPhone.

As my colleague Philip Elmer-deWitt points out, you can’t blame Nokia for having its nose out of joint.  Apple, according to Nokia, has gotten a free ride since the iPhone launched—a very fast ride. Apple commands 22% of the smartphone market in the US, according to IDC. Globally, it holds 12% of the market, more than doubling its share from last year.

Meanwhile, despite its best efforts, Nokia has steadily lost ground. It holds 40% of the market, down from 43% last year, according to IDC. And in the competitive North American market, Nokia is barely holding its own with just 3%.

Recognizing that the North American market is more crucial than ever, Nokia has spent the last couple years retooling its strategy. It installed its chief financial officer in the U.S. It opened new offices in Atlanta to be close to AT&T Mobility (AT&T) and in Parsippany, N.J., to be near Verizon Wireless (VZ). And it put several hundred product developers in its San Diego design center to work in collaboration with AT&T and Verizon Wireless on some new products.

The efforts have begun to yield dividends as North American carriers have started to support a slew of new cell phones—and even a couple of smartphones—but progress is slow going. “We’ve not been good at delivering promises in the past,” Niklas Savander, who heads up Nokia’s services division, told me recently, in describing Nokia’s relationships with the carriers. “It’s a trust thing and it doesn’t go away easily.”

Savander said he's also stepping up the company’s efforts with its Ovi store by making strategic acquisitions, mostly as a way to hire new software development talent. In September, Nokia bought social networking company Plum Ventures and traveling startup Dopplr.

So far, these changes have not been enough to jumpstart Nokia’s smartphone growth. On October 15, the company reported a third-quarter loss of $836 million as sales fell 20% from a year earlier (in North America, sales dropped 25%). And as the Christmas season approaches, bringing a gaggle of gadgets for Santa to deliver, Nokia has a paltry smartphone offeri. It’s easy to understand why the telecommunications giant, explaining that it has sunk $60 billion into the research and development that has helped enable the devices to take off, might at least want Apple to share the wealth.