Word: backe
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...Back to the Future Steve Jobs didn't invent the tablet computer. In the past 10 years, practically every serious PC company has shipped one. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, a man impervious to the lessons of history, arrived at the Consumer Electronics Show (the Comdex de nos jours) in January waving yet another Windows tablet, this one made by Hewlett-Packard. But nobody has ever gotten the marketplace to pay attention. The tablet computer is like a siren that calls seductively to computer engineers, only to wreck them fatally on the stony coast of our total lack of interest...
...computer is the greatest all-purpose creativity tool since the pen. It put a music studio, a movie studio, a darkroom and a publishing house on everybody's desk. The iPad shifts the emphasis from creating content to merely absorbing and manipulating it. It mutes you, turns you back into a passive consumer of other people's masterpieces. In that sense, it's a step backward. Not much of a fairy-tale ending. Except for the people who are selling content...
...Amazon's Kindle reader; publishers, it seems, have long yearned to escape from Amazon's tough control over pricing. I asked John Makinson, chairman and chief executive of Penguin, why he's so keen on the iPad. He told me he likes the fact that "it gives control back to us and allows us to discover how the market is developing. Frankly, when I saw the iPad, it was like an epiphany ... This has to be the future of publishing. You'll know if you've spent any time with one." "Yes," I say. "I hope...
...Nonetheless, back in those days the Mac was derided as a toy, a media poseur's plaything and a shallow triumph of style over substance by those with a belief that computers, as utilitarian tools performing serious functions for business, should be under the control not of the user but of IT technicians and systems engineers. Despite the PC's eventual adoption of a Mac-style graphical user interface with the release of Windows 95, the damage had been done to Apple. By 1997, the company was in deep crisis. Douglas and I got used to the gloating sympathy...
...Apple in 1997, after it purchased NeXT, is now the stuff of legend. In the design department, Jobs saw the work of a young Briton called Jonathan Ive and asked for a meeting. Ive, underused and ignored for a year, turned up with a resignation letter tucked into the back pocket of his jeans. He left with instructions to unleash his talent. The result was the iMac, an all-in-one computer in a white-and-Bondi-blue transparent housing as far removed from the standard beige box of the day as could be imagined. Ive's next major designs...