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The lowdown on Steve Jobs’ future Woodside home

OK, so for about two whole weeks, the WWWW (Whole World Wide Web) has been a-buzzing about the supposedly exclusive plans that Gizmodo unveiled of Steve’s future home in Woodside. Now that the story is a little more behind us, I thought I’d recap and use the occasion to come back on the whole Woodside affair, that’s been going on for years.

1. Context

As most of you know, Steve has owned a mansion in Woodside since 1984. He bought it with the money he made at Apple after the company’s IPO in 1980. The mansion — 14,540 sq.— was built in the 1920s by a copper magnate, Daniel Jackling, hence its nickname “the Jackling house”. It is located in the exclusive neighborhood of Woodside, not too far from Larry Ellison’s Japanese estate. Steve lived in it when he was a bachelor, roughly from 1984 to the early or mid-1990s (shortly after his marriage with Laurene). You can see pictures of Steve inside his mansion on all about Steve Jobs (I chose one of my favorites here).

One thing you will note is that most of the rooms are devoid of furniture. As a matter of fact, the only room that was fully furbished inside the mansion was the kitchen — not that Steve was a great cook, he hired a couple who cooked for him.

Understandably, Laurene refused to live in this empty mansion, and had Steve and their new family move to a less reclusive — and slightly more furnished — house in Palo Alto. The Woodside mansion has been abandoned since then. (more…)

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Pictures of the expansion of Pixar’s campus

The best Pixar online resource I know of (if you know a better one, let me know in comments) reports new pictures of the expansion of the Pixar campus in Emeryville.

Pixar expansion construction photos (Sept. 2010)

I am writing on this because it gives me the occasion to go back on three things:

1. I was a little skeptical in 2006, when the Pixar/Disney merger occurred, that Pixar would lose its identity. Apparently, it’s not the case — not only are the movies still great, but the company still enjoys the paradise-like environment of its genius-filled Emeryville campus, far from the bean counters of Burbank. I think it’s a powerful statement of independence. For the record, Steve himself could not force the then-small Pixar team to move to the South Bay in the early 1990s. They refused because being away from him gave them greater freedom to work on what they chose to. History proved them right.
2. The “fence-gate”, so to speak. Perhaps you don’t know, or don’t remember, but this expansion was first blocked by the neighbors of the Emeryville campus. They complained that Pixar lived in its own world, isolated from the city community by the huge fence surrounding their campus. Tom Carlisle, in charge of Pixar’s facilities, made Pixar’s case pretty simply: ““If the city takes away our fence, we will not stay in Emeryville.” I am quoting the guy because he’s known Steve for a long time. He was in charge of NeXT’s headquarters back in the 1990s, as you can see on the pic on the right.
3. Pixar’s campus is great, but what about Apple’s planned new campus? Gee, it takes even longer than the future Woodside home to appear 😉 (more on that soon btw). So far, no sign of progress whatsoever. Apple has moved to the former HP offices that they were supposed to tear down, well, for four years… My opinion: Steve doesn’t have enough time to concentrate on both new Apple products and a perfect new campus. Not to mention his own home. This will take years, perhaps construction will not even start before he’s retired.

I’d also like to point out again that this blog is really about Steve Jobs, not Apple. Pixar, though less important, is Steve’s other company, and deserves to be mentioned on this blog just as much. Who doesn’t love Pixar anyway?

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Who will succeed to Steve Jobs?

Interesting article I stumbled upon today, from a Jon Korbin on EzineMark.com. It deals with what I think is one of the most controversial issues for Apple in the future: the succession of Steve Jobs.

The 2-part article starts with a highly dithyrambic description of Steve’s role at Apple, one even your fellow webmaster would not dare write. Excerpt:

He has erected temples to Apple’s greatness in major cities around the world whose awesome presence evokes imagery of high priests and virgins surrounded by platinum chalices spilling over with grapes on the vine.

My attention was caught by the following two points in the article — they reflect my two main concerns about a Steve-less Apple. First, the control that only Steve can have a huge corporation like Apple.

His intimidating sense of control has afforded him the kind of command over this ever-growing audience that seldom belongs to individuals who don’t draw their power from Government or God.

The author is referring to Apple fanboys like us. But this is not the issue. The issue is about Apple itself. (more…)

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Pathetic website: Where’s Jobs

I have nothing against Steve Jobs humor – I was an avid reader of Fake Steve when he was an active, satirist blogger. But I think we’ve crossed the line of pointlessness with Where’s Jobs, a website where people submit fake pictures on which they’ve added teeny-tiny pictures of Steve Jobs (à la Where’s Waldo). See for yourself.

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Jobs House Gallery gizmodo.com/5650062//galle… via @gizmodo

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The iPod ninja

Scoopertino (“unreal Apple news”) made a funny parody in reaction to the fake story about Steve at the Kyoto airport:

Steve Jobs ninja stars revealed to be iPod prototypes.

Check out the product design 😉

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Steve emails about Apple TV shipment

MacRumors reported yesterday that Steve sent an email to one of their readers about the soon-to-begin shipment of the new Apple TV. The style is Steve-ish to say the least.

Any update on shipment of your hobby project? Looks like it will have to ship early next week for delivery before the end of this month.

Yep.

Sent from my iPhone

Amazing, isn’t it? 🙂
Seriously, I will report here any email Steve sends or is rumored to have sent. I was planning to open an “emails from steve” page on all about Steve Jobs.com but this blog is the perfect place for that. I can’t believe Emails from Steve Jobs thought of it before I did.

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Steve Jobs worth $6.1 billion, ranked 42nd richest American by Forbes

Forbes released yesterday their 2010 ranking of the 400 richest Americans. This year Steve Jobs is ranked the 42nd richest American (136th worldwide) with a net worth of $6.1 billion.
The graph on the right shows that despite the worldwide crisis, Steve’s worth has kept growing over the recent years. Ironically, most of that wealth comes from Steve’s involvement with Pixar (now $4.4 billion in Disney stock). As far as political donations are concerned, do not trust the  $26,700 figure given here. For years, Steve has given to the Democratic party using his wife’s name, as can be seen here.

In the tech world, nothing is really new under the sun. Steve’s good friend and future neighbor (in Woodside) Larry Ellison is now worth $27 billion, the 3rd richest American behind Warren Buffet and of course Uncle Bill (worth $54 billion). The Google guys Larry Page and Sergey Brin are each worth $15 billion, while Eric Schmidt is down to $5.5 billion. The talk of the town is more about Mark Zuckergerg, whose net worth is valued at $6.9 billion — hence more than Steve’s.

Venture Beat interestingly comments by saying:

The dichotomy between the two CEOs points to an interesting fact: where as Jobs was fired from his company back in 1985, Zuckerberg has done a commendable job of keeping in power, still controlling an unprecedented 25 percent of the company and the majority of board seats. The young CEO probably learned a thing or two from Jobs’ mishap, and it seems to have paid off. He also had good counsel from Sean Parker, the founder of Napster and Plaxo, who had been booted out of his companies. Parker, who was Facebook’s first president until he was ousted, was determined to raise funding in a way that would preserve Zuckerberg’s control of Facebook, and that strategy has by and large panned out.

My comments: (more…)

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Decorate your desk with a bust of Steve

Dutch artist Metin Seven built a small, Lego-like bust of Steve Jobs so that you can have the iLeader always keep an eye on you. It was made using an advanced 3D-printing process (although it looks vintage with its pixel-like appearance and Steve’s dark hair) and will cost you $117.

Source: Technabob.

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Sycophantic article about Steve on the Telegraph website

The Telegraph posted an article today that sings the praises of Apple’s CEO. It is for a broad audience and therefore we, knowledgeable people, will learn nothing from it. However I am still posting about it to illustrate my point in the previous post regarding how common it is to praise Steve nowadays. I will try and find an article from 10-15 years ago to make the contrast more apparent.

For a change, there aren’t that many errors in the article, except for the description of Jony Ive, who is described as the designer behind Apple’s computer and iPod range” instead of the head designer behind every piece of hardware that has come out of Cupertino for the last 13 years.

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