Family Learning Center

Posts Tagged ‘Twelve Years’

Steve Jobs visits Wall Street Journal, trashes Flash again

Filed under: Internet Tools, Steve Jobs, iPad

Valleywag reports that during a recent iPad-promoting visit to the offices of the Wall Street Journal, Steve Jobs spent a significant amount of time trash-talking Adobe Flash yet again, and doing his best to get the Journal to move away from what he called “old technology.” Just like Jobs’s comments during the recent Apple Town Hall meeting, these comments are unconfirmed, but Valleywag claims to have heard from people who were present at the meeting.

Click the “read more” link to see some more tidbits from the meeting and some analysis of the remarks.

It bears noting once again that none of these quotes are confirmed, direct quotes from Jobs, but rather hearsay from others purportedly present at the meeting. That having been said, Jobs allegedly:

1. Continues to call Flash a buggy Mac crasher.

2. Called the platform a “CPU hog,” a source of security holes, and a “dying technology.”

3. Compared Flash to other technologies Apple and other companies have abandoned, such as floppy discs and CCFL-backlit LCDs.

4. Claimed the iPad’s battery performance would decrease from 10 hours to a shockingly low 1.5 hours if it ran Flash.

5. Said switching the Journal’s site away from Flash would be “trivial.”

If these are direct quotes free of any embellishment from their sources, they paint an interesting picture. On points 1 and 2, Jobs’s claim is mostly true. While some people claim to have had no issues with Flash Player on the Mac, in my experience Flash has been the number one source of crashes and poor performance on every Mac I’ve come across. Whether Flash is truly a “dying technology” or not is something only time will tell. For point 3, Jobs seems to believe that Apple’s abandonment of Flash on its mobile devices is trailblazing in the same manner as the iMac’s ditching the floppy drive twelve years ago; this one is arguable, as there were viable alternatives to floppy drives back then, whereas HTML5 and other Flash alternatives are still in relative infancy. On point 4, while the claim may sound outlandish, Jobs is certainly in a better position than anyone to know how well the iPad would run Flash.

Point 5, however, is the most loaded. As Valleywag notes, shifting a site that’s heavily dependent on Flash for not only video but interactive elements like slideshows to another technology would be far from trivial. That’s not to say that it couldn’t or even shouldn’t be done, and the Journal and others are likely to shift away from Flash despite the difficulties involved, but the amount of money, resources, and programming time necessary for the task are by no means as trivial as Jobs is painting them.

One thing is clear though: Steve Jobs is on a mission, and if his recent (alleged) comments are anything to go by, part of that mission is killing Flash once and for all. No matter what you may think of Jobs or his opinions of Flash, it’s undeniable that when Jobs speaks, people listen very intently. It will be very interesting to see how Adobe responds to this latest salvo.

[Via MacRumors]

TUAWSteve Jobs visits Wall Street Journal, trashes Flash again originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

Is Jobs looking to overhaul education with the tablet?

Filed under: Education, Steve Jobs

TechCrunch is reporting that Steve Jobs has been heard saying that the Apple tablet will “be the most important thing I’ve ever done.”

We haven’t heard this first hand, but we’ve heard it multiple times second and third hand from completely independent sources. Senior Apple execs and friends of Jobs are telling people that he’s about as excited about the upcoming Apple Tablet as he’s ever been. Coming from the man who has created so much, that’s saying something.

This got me thinking. More “important” than the iPhone? Why “most important” and not “most innovative”? Maybe Steve wants to do more than reinvigorate the publishing industry? I dug back through some stories where I could surmise what Steve Jobs viewed as “important” – and for a guy with such strong feelings about so much, one thing stuck out: his passion about the importance of education reform. Could it be possible that Steve sees education as the primary function of the tablet? Does Jobs sees a tablet in the hands of every school child in America?

In 1995, giving a speech to the Smithsonian, Jobs said:

I think the school situation has a parallel here when it comes to technology. It is so much more hopeful to think that technology can solve the problems that are more human and more organizational and more political in nature, and it ain’t so. We need to attack these things at the root, which is people and how much freedom we give people, the competition that will attract the best people. Unfortunately, there are side effects, like pushing out a lot of 46-year-old teachers who lost their spirit fifteen years ago and shouldn’t be teaching anymore. I feel very strongly about this. I wish it was as simple as giving it over to the computer.

Twelve years later, Steve Jobs gave a speech at an education reform conference in Austin, Texas. At the conference, Jobs reiterated that no amount of technology in the classroom would improve public schools until principals could fire bad teachers. However, at the same conference he reportedly told the audience that he envisioned schools in the future replacing textbooks with a free, online information source that is constantly updated by experts.

“I think we’d have far more current material available to our students and we’d be freeing up a tremendous amount of funds that we could buy delivery vehicles with — computers, faster Internet, things like that,” he said. “And I also think we’d get some of the best minds in the country contributing.”

Maybe Steve sees the tablet as a dynamic textbook that will allow schools to free up those funds? Or, at least these textbook publishers hope so. Who knows, maybe iTunes U was just the start?

This is, of course, nothing more than conjecture – an educated guess, if you’ll pardon the expression.

TUAWIs Jobs looking to overhaul education with the tablet? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 25 Jan 2010 08:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

Finding Family Is Big Business: Ancestry.com Files For $75 Million IPO

After going a year with nary a venture-backed IPO in sight, here’s more proof that things are finally beginning to perk up: Ancestry.com, a genealogy service that allows user to map out and search for their family history, has filed for a $75 million IPO. You can see the full SEC filing here.

Ancestry.com offers some basic functionality for free, but to tap into the site’s vast library of historical records, which includes billions of documents and photographs, users have to sign up for a premium subscription. The company claims nearly 1 million subscribers, with an average revenue of $16.50 per subscriber. With monthly churn of 4.1% and a acquisition cost of $67.30, the company can make its money back in four months for each subscriber. In the last six months, Ancestry has made $107 million, with profits of $8 million and a run rate of $200 million.

Back in October 2007 Spectrum Equity Investors led a $300 million buyout of Ancestry.com’s parent company, The Generations Network (which now calls itself Ancestry.com Inc). But it wasn’t a complete buyout, with employees and possibly some outside investors retaining equity in the company.

Ancestry has been on the web for over twelve years, but its roots extend back to 1984, when the company published family history books. The company now employs more than 600 people.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Read the whole story…