Salon.com > Dan Shafer

SALON Daily Clicks: Newsreal

Thu, 31 Jul 1997 19:00:00 +0000

the Wall Street Journal's headline said it best: "Even Without the Titles, Jobs is Running Apple." By turning down the Apple board's offers to make him the official CEO or chairman, Jobs made it clear that he prefers it that way.

While his rather bluntly worded rejection of the offers -- explained in an e-mail to employees at his beloved and far more lucrative Pixar company -- looks like another pratfall for Apple, Jobs may have done the struggling computer company a favor.

Had he taken either of the lofty titles, it would have been very hard indeed to recruit an executive capable enough of actually running the business on a day-to-day basis -- a talent that Jobs does not have. He is a technologist, one with flair and style, to be sure, but he doesn't have the marketing or administrative chops to keep Apple afloat, let alone prosperous, in the increasingly murderous waters of the computer business. Even in the less hands-on position of chairman, it's hard to imagine who he could have found to be the CEO. Who would want to come into a company in such parlous straits and at the same time have to deal with its charismatic founder and Fearless Leader once more at the helm?

SALON Daily Clicks: Newsreal

Wed, 02 Apr 1997 20:00:00 +0000

First balls were thrown out all over the country Tuesday (except for Baltimore's Camden Yards, which didn't get the message that winter is over) with the usual Opening Day hoopla and misty-eyed romanticism about what it all means.

Banished only temporarily were more sober thoughts about whether Major League Baseball has anything left to give that America still wants. The nation's oldest professional sport, which has acted like a spoiled brat in recent seasons -- including a prolonged strike in 1994 -- needs to put things right fast or be relegated to the backwaters of lacrosse and curling.

Any reason to be hopeful is easily dimmed by the sport's recent track record of incredible stupidity.

Sure, baseball will survive. Millions of kids -- of all ages -- will continue to tramp through stone-filled, balding fields with rickety fences to play ball, whether the Bigs go on or not. College baseball has plenty of juice left. But the high-paid pros don't have much time to prove to the fans that they get it.

SALON Daily Clicks: Newsreal

Thu, 19 Dec 1996 20:00:00 +0000

i guess I wasn't paying attention to sports this year. I sure thought I was, but the folks at Sports Illustrated have set me straight on that point. They've chosen a 20-year-old freshman pro-golfer with two -- count 'em, two! -- titles to his name as the Sportsman of the Year.

As it happens, I'm a prety big fan of young Tiger Woods, the former Stanford golfer who has already begun to cut a pretty big swath through the ranks of professional golf. And, God knows, pro-golf needed a shot of this kind of adrenaline. Woods has begun doing for golf what Muhammad Ali did for boxing, what John McEnroe did for tennis, what Bobby Fischer did for chess. He's given the game pizzazz, excitement, joie de vivre. He's elevated some aspects of the game to an art form.

But Sportsman of the Year? Get real, SI!

How about the Denver Broncos' stellar quarterback John Elway? Not one of my favorite people (I've never quite forgiven his arrogance as a college grad when he told the NFL to stuff it and refused to allow himself to be drafted by the team with rights to the Number 1 pick ... and got away with it) but as a sportsman, Elway has been at the top since he came into the league. And he's having a banner season in the waning years of his pro career.

SALON Daily Clicks: Newsreal

Tue, 17 Dec 1996 20:00:00 +0000

for weeks, the rumors have swirled. Apple is going out of business. Apple has no next-generation operating system. Desperate Apple seeks help from unlikely former executive.

This latest round of the Apple death-watch has focused on a little company called Be Labs, founded and run by one of the most volatile and eccentric personalities ever to grace an Apple executive office, Jean-Louis Gassie. Be has done, in less than two years, what Apple has been unable to do in nearly six: develop a new, state-of-the-art operating system kernel to run on the Motorola PowerPC processors which lie at the heart of Macintosh and Macintosh-clone computers.

Apple's operating system is old and creaky. Its "updates" have made the most meager of technical improvements. Meanwhile, Apple's arch operating system rival, Microsoft, has released three versions of its widely popular Windows system and two major upgrades to its long-term strategic OS design dubbed Windows NT.

What's really wrong with the current Macintosh OS? Critics typically focus on three problems:

Santa, Forget the Computer

Mon, 16 Dec 1996 13:26:00 +0000

for the first time in the 15-plus years I've been in this business, I'm recommending to you and to my friends not to buy a personal computer this Christmas season unless you really can't wait a few months. The computer manufacturers have done themselves and you a tremendous disservice this season by announcing and then delaying several important new technologies that won't be available on computers that ship before the end of the year.

Don't get me wrong. The computer business is always busy obsoleting itself. In fact, that's the only way it can survive. Most of the time when people ask me, "Should I buy a computer now or wait until the next whizzy thing comes out?" I smile and suggest that they buy the computer now. There is a cost associated with waiting: economists refer to it as opportunity cost. It takes into account the things you don't do at all, or as well, while you wait for the technology to "settle down," which, of course, it never does. Years ago, Ralph Nader wrote about "planned obsolescence" in the automobile industry. The computer makers must have learned that lesson and taken it to amazingly new heights.
This Christmas, though, the story is different.

Desktop Warriors

Mon, 02 Dec 1996 09:35:00 +0000

we have quietly entered the Cold War phase of the battle for your computer desktop. Just as global armed conflict gave way to subtler confrontations based on threats and propaganda, the heated battles over operating systems and competing browsers have recently gone underground, down to the level of code. The stakes, however, are just as high.

Ultimately, you will have to live and work with whatever system prevails in this war. But you aren't likely to be asked for your opinion. The battle is being posited as too technical for you. The engineers will let you know when they've decided its outcome.

The battle is about making monstrously large things smaller and more manageable, about shattering monoliths into usable components. It's about flexibility. Ultimately, it's about freedom of choice. The victor will surely dominate desktop computing for the next two to five years.

I think you ought to have a say in this war, don't you?

Apple falls from grace

Mon, 21 Oct 1996 19:27:00 +0000

welcome to the mainstream, Apple. The colorful ride is over.

Apple's announcement Thursday that it will slash the prices of its low-end computers and introduce another consumer-oriented machine will be greeted with great enthusiasm in most circles. Home computer buyers, stockholders, and most Apple employees will undoubtedly benefit from this strategy. But the benefit -- and the attendant joy -- will almost certainly be short-lived.

The announcement comes on the heels of Wednesday's surprise $25 million quarterly profit report, though the two are clearly not directly related; no company can move that fast, even a trimmer Apple.
When a company reduces prices on its products, profit margins fall, and overall profits usually follow. With lower profits, you can all but bet that Apple will further reduce spending in areas where it thinks it can afford to do so. One of those areas will almost certainly be research and development.

Turning point in the Browser Wars

Fri, 13 Sep 1996 09:10:00 +0000

the World Wide Web Browser Wars, not content with gracing the cover of Time this week, opened a new front at Seybold San Francisco this week -- and this particular dust-up between Microsoft and Netscape may well have revealed the long-term victor.

It was advertised as a debate. But Netscape, apparently refusing to appear unless the two companies' presentations were separate, deprived an overflow audience at the Seybold keynote of a head-to-head clash. As it turned out, that was probably just as well; a debate would have been far too one-sided.

Microsoft, facing an audience with anti-Windows venom coursing through its Apple-rainbow-colored veins, wowed the crowd -- while Netscape, which has had the (low- to no-profit) World Wide Web browser "market" to itself for most of the past two years, did little to advance its cause. It was one of the finest examples in recent history of a company snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.